In 2016, the City of Milpitas set up the first Geotour in California. Geotours are a series of geocaches that are arranged around a theme with the goal of introducing the cache finders to a new place (and its doors).
Milpitas is a mid-sized city in the South Bay, between San Jose and Fremont. The caches took us to places such as the library, which has a couple of nice doors. For example this former grammar school building is now part of the library:
Here is the main library door:
The first day of the tour last year was gray and rainy so there wasn’t much competition for the caches . . .
. . . except for these kids on the lawn:
Each of the geocaches also had a password inside, and if you collected 20 of the passwords, you received a geocoin. My husband and I actually finished 20 caches sometime last year but were never in Milpitas during business hours to pick up our geocoins. We tried going again between Christmas and New Year’s but the recreation department was closed.
Back in Milpitas on an errand, I decided to try one more time before the Tour ended, and went back to the community center with our passports.
We were lucky, there were still some coins left. And a couple more doors too!
Thursday Doors is a weekly feature allowing door lovers to come together to admire and share their favorite door photos from around the world. Feel free to join in at Norm 2.0’s link!
Milpitas! Wow! I know of Milpitas because I belong to the Society for Creative Anachronism (sca.org), and back before the Internet, when you had to actually send in checks for things like membership dues, our dues always went to Milpitas. Not sure if the entire Society is based there or just the membership department (I’ve been lazy about looking it up). It occasionally comes as a shock to me that the city exists for other purposes, too. 🙂 (I’ve been in the SCA for almost 30 years, give or take.)
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I’ve known quite a few SCA people through SF fandom. It looks like fun!
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It is. 🙂 It can be a great way to disconnect from modern society, learn about a specific time period and culture, and meet other weirdos. 😉
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I live in Silicon Valley and play the viola. Lots of opportunities for meeting other weirdos! 🙂
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Wow! What a contrast! Do you know why they decided to repurpose the doors?
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Not just the doors, the whole building.
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Those sculptures are great and what an elegant building that school was (and the library is.)
janet
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That beautiful building was a grammar school!? Wow. Those lawn sculptures are just adorable. What a fun post 🙂
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Great photos. I like the idea of the passports. They issued them here to encourage visiting the various art museums.
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I love those sculptures! Milpitas is just south of where I live – I’ve been through it many times but never stopped.
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Have you heard of the Düsseldorfer Radschläger? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%BCsseldorf%27s_cartwheeler
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Only indirectly! In the US one of the few German cities that Americans have heard of and can pronounce is Düsseldorf. There was a guy in my college dorm down the hall who though my name (Allendoerfer) sounded like Düsseldorfer, so he called me that and then shortened it to Dussel. When I went to Germany the next summer as part of a program through the German department, I found a postcard that had a picture of kids cartwheeling and it had printed on it “Gruss aus der Duesseldorfer Altstadt.” I sent this card to my friend because I thought he would get a kick out of it (he did). But I didn’t know the cartwheels the kids were doing meant anything special!
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Certainly you found out what Dussel (without the umlaut) actually means? 🙂 Few native speakers of English (the Scots excluded) can pronounce Düsseldorf (with the umlaut) correctly.
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Sigh. Don’t get me started on that! The worst one of those for me is schwül vs. schwul.
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Lol…
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I think this was actually the image on that postcard from Düsseldorf: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/Duesseldorfer_Radschlaeger.jpg
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I love the playful sculptures and I’m glad you finally received your coins.
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