2010-01-30 33 -116

Location

A field just south of Ramona Airport in Ramona, California.

Participants

Plans

Hey, it's a nice day out and it's easily accessible by road. Let's go!

Expedition

We drove towards Poway from Balboa Park in downtown San Diego. There were zillions of enormous rocks stuck every which way in the hills. Google Maps wanted us to drive my tiny car down a muddy dirt road, so we took a different approach and ended up finding a nice paved approach - most of the way. We ended up driving down a dirt road just east of the airport. It was a county road, with signs at the intersections and everything! We eventually found an entrance to the field and wandered around picking up a few golf balls, dodging enormous rocks, and trying to find the coordinates. The coordinates ended up being at or around the corner fencepost of a barb-wire enclosed lake - I guess that's what they mean by circle of confusion. A couple times, for a second, we saw it report "[mrk]" which means we were there. Yay! I forgot to bring food, so there was no picnic today.

While we were searching for the coordinates there was a nonstop flow of planes landing and taking off at Ramona Airport, just north of us. We saw a tiny Cessna and a pressurized business plane and two really old planes that looked like they were from the 1940s. So after we hiked out of the field and bumped our way to the main road, we went to the airport and admired the firefighting planes. As we watched the two old planes took off into the sunset. It was totally cool.