My weekend was fun. Friday night CCC and I walked to downtown Mountain View and had dinner at an Italian restaurant. I like walking to a restaurant -- you get to burn off a small percentage of the food you eat at the restaurant on the walk home.

Saturday I went geocaching with OAW. The usual crowd that has been showing up for geocaching was there. CCC and I got lost twice on the way to Briones park. The first oopsy was taking 580 East instead of 580 west to Oakland. I had to stop by P.'s house in Oakland to give her back her boots that she left in my car way back in early June. I realized I was heading the wrong direction when I saw signs for 680. So I got off the freeway and on it again in the opposite direction. The boots were safely deposited at P.'s home then we headed to 24 to get to Briones. We looked for the Happy Valley exit but it never appeared and what do you know, we ran into 680 again. We did another turn around and on the way back saw an Upper Happy Valley exit and took it. We finally got to the park at 10:50 about 50 minutes late. However the gang was still waiting for us as it turned out that almost everyone but our intrepid leader, S., was late.

The geocaching was fun. The second cache we found was hilarious. We spent ages wandering around looking for it. Finally CCC spotted an unusual looking cow pie which she thought might be the disguised cache, but she didn't want to pick it up to find out. So yours truly braved picking up a real cow pie to see if it was fake. It was fake. It was a very good plastic replica of a cow pie glued on top of a gallon container that was buried in the ground. I also got a vast amount of burrs in my socks and shoe laces while looking for this cache:

The rest of the caches were more typical. At one cache we left CCC behind to finish her sketching and when she came to find us she took a wrong turn and hiked quite a ways on the wrong trail. We got back to the trail and I was really worried when I couldn't find her. I ran up the hill to see if she walked up it and to get a view of the trails. No sign of her when I got to the top, but on the way down she popped around the corner much to my relief. We found one last cache and then headed back to the cars. We stopped at a group camp to drink some water. We were all quite thirsty especially SL's dog and SH's dog. It was good to find this camp and refill on water.

We went out to dinner in Orinda after the geocaching. We ate at a Greek restaurant. I had a gyro and Greek fries and a coke. It was an excellent gyro. The fries were only Greek in that some kind of Greek spice was sprinkled on them. Otherwise they seemed incredibly like French Fries or should I say Freedom Fries. For desert we walked down the street to an ice cream store. I had a single scoop cone of Almond Mocha Fudge ice cream. It was very yummy and a nice way to end the geocaching trip.

Sunday I got to sleep in. I went to bed at 11:30 p.m. Saturday night and got up at 11:30 a.m. Sunday morning. Hurray ... 12 hours of sleep in my comfy bed. I had breakfast for lunch and then headed to CCC's house. We drove over to Stanford to look at the New Guinea Sculpture Garden. It was a very relaxing afternoon and I enjoyed myself more than I thought I would. I sometimes get bored looking at art but with CCC, an artist, along it seemed more interesting. We also had fun making funny comments about the sculptures.

Sunday night I spent by myself cleaning house and watching TV. It was good to get my place cleaned up a bit. The floor was still strewn with backpacking equipment from last weekend.