Last hike of the vacation

Today is the last day of my winter/Christmas vacation.  The break is mostly an eating break, or so it seems with two holidays crammed into a short time frame, there just seems to be eating, and then more eating.  We had a New Year's Eve party at our house and we're still eating leftovers from that shindig.

Since this was the last day, I decided to go for a hike to burn off some of those excess calories.  There was a geocache I wanted to find and it was about a two mile hike to get to, so it looked like a good outing for the day.  The hider of the geocache had found an old geocache of mine I had archived back in November 2008.  He found the remains of the cache over 100 feet from where it was supposed to be while finding another of my caches I placed after archiving that one.  Got that?  

The gist of the matter is he used all the stuff that was in my old cache and created a new one.  How could I not go after it?  With blustery winds and brilliant clouds in the sky I set off.  I stopped here and there to take some shots including the one above.  I found one cache before finding the other one, so it was a successful hike and geocaching experience.  The second cache was situated on top of a hill with a commanding view.  With the cool weather we've been having, it was very easy to see a long distance.  In the second photo, you can see the sun shining off of the Pacific Ocean and Catalina Island beyond, perhaps 50 miles distant from my location.

Unfortunately, what you can't see in that photo is the rain coming right at me.  Just off to the right of that photo, I could see rain in the distance.  I'd cut it too close and as soon as I put my camera down to look at the image I'd just taken, I saw a rain drop plop into the middle of my LCD screen.  Taking the camera and putting it underneath the photo vest I was wearing, I hurried as best I could back down the hill, but the rain was coming too quickly and I had two miles to walk and/or run to get back to my car.

I was able to trot along for a little bit but the trail was steep in spots and it was also getting slick with water and mud, so walking seemed to be prudent.  Me going down while trying to protect camera gear would not have been pretty, so I opted for getting wet while keeping the gear as dry as possible. To add insult to injury, a mile and three quarters down the hill with only a quarter mile to go, it started hailing on me.

By the time I was down, I was soaked through to the skin in most places.  Fortunately, the extra layers of my photo vest kept the camera dry and the extra layers of my pockets kept my iTouch and Cellphone dry, so I'm going to call it a good day.  

I think that's only about the third time where I've had to hike a prolonged distance in the rain.  The worst time was when I was backpacking in the Sierra Nevada back when I was in college and we had to camp in it.  This hike today seemed worse at the time, but since I've had a hot shower, it doesn't seem so bad in retrospect.  It could have been a lot worse.  I could have a lot of damaged gear.  All I really have is a bruised ego from getting caught in the rain.