aussies, caches & del taco

Last Tuesday, April 24, we headed over to Barstow (an hour and a half drive) to attend a geocaching meet & greet and go to the original Del Taco in Yermo. Also on my to-do list was visiting another Del Taco in Lenwood, just south of Barstow, that is owned by the man who started Del Taco.

The original Del Taco is now Tita’s Burger Den. The original Del Taco sign is intact and I don’t think anything else has changed, either, except the menu.

~ Lookit, Stevie! The original Del Taco! ~

Forty years ago I discovered Del Taco while living in Anaheim, California. The only thing was, the closest Del Taco at that time was in Costa Mesa… 20-30 minutes away. But that never stopped me from grabbing my little brother (that would be Stevie), who was 7 at the time, and heading on over there for a Del Beef Burrito whenever a craving hit.

A few years later we moved to Hawthorne. Now it was a two hour drive.  Of course, that didn’t deter me and Steve from cruising down to Costa Mesa once in a while. It wasn’t long until we had a Del Taco nearby, but it just wasn’t the same.

The original Del Taco owner, after selling the Del Taco chain, decided to open his own Del Taco in Lenwood (above). I was hoping to meet the owner, but he only comes in on weekends. <insert boo-boo face>

After visiting the two Del Tacos, we grabbed a couple of caches, stopped at two post offices and visited a nice NYFD memorial in Barstow before heading over to the meet and greet.

Now, meet our hosts at the Aussie’s on Route 66 (GC3CBTV) meet & greet:

Thanks to Warren, Ralph & Paul (Sol de Lune, Albida33 and Mtrax), geocachers from Australia, we went to to an area we hadn’t been before, met lots of cachers we’d never met and visited with one that came to our event last January. We had a great time.

p.s. We also got a date stamp at the Barstow post office. Yermo closed at 4:30 so that one will have to wait for our next trip to Barstow Las Vegas. If we hadn’t chatted with two nice young men at the Burger Den (the owner’s son and an Army pilot) for so long, we might have gotten to the Yermo post office before it closed.

11-11-11 flash mob

11-11-11 comes only once a century, so when we spotted an event cache for that day we decided to go. The event was 11-11-11 Flash Mob and was held on a street corner in Los Angeles. We met at 11:11 a.m. at 11111 Olympic Boulevard for 11 minutes of geocaching chit-chat. Most of us stayed closer to 20 minutes, even though time was called when the event was officially over. It’s hard to leave when you’re having a great time visiting with fellow cachers.

note the date on the billboard: