He was often criticized for having his two children late in life (he was 44 when I was born). His friends’ thoughts being that he would be too old to do active things with us when we were teens, and probably would never see his grandchildren. Boy, were they ever wrong! He took my sister and I hiking and horseback riding, and was last asked to be master of ceremonies at an installation when he was 92. He saw all three of his grandchildren graduate from high school, read to them nearly every day as they were growing up, and shared his whacky sense of humor with all of us ‘til the very end.
His favorite nickname for his grandsons was Watanabe, hence the series name. He often picked the boys up from school, and took them on intricate tours of the nearby rural area, sometimes taking an hour to drive the half-mile distance between the school and his house. If there was a pattern to these drives, we never discovered it. The names Boondocks, Constantinople, and Timbuktu were usually part of the itinerary, though their locations appeared to mysteriously move from one day to the next.
Even though his house (and our business) was a mile in the opposite direction, he often took this route when he took the boys “home” from school, his short version being a drive “around the block” in a manner that added a good ten miles to the drive, his long version going down roads we didn‘t even know existed. The boys loved the curvy road, and the tunnel effect created by the canal berm and the agricultural fields. Although Dunlap #2 obviously has citrus, there are date palms further down; and the crops in the fields range from alph-alpha to vegetables to spices.
To take the personal history just one step further, Dunlap Ranch Management were respected customers of our grower’s supply business (Desert Box & Supply) for years before it burned in an arson fire in 2004.
In memory of Rewell."Doc" Carlton, October 1910 - July 2004
PLEASE NOTE: Dunlap was gracious enough to risk giving permission to place this cache. Feel free to take lots of pictures. However, if you go down the dirt road between the groves you are trespassing (that means the cache is not there). Picking fruit from trees, or crops from fields, costs farmers thousands of dollars every year. It is illegal, and the Sheriff’s Department WILL arrest anyone sampling the fruit. We've also promised the owner that no one will go traipsing through his trees. The cache is NOT in the trees. In fact, it's not anywhere near the trees. It is best to park on the dirt shoulder on the other side of the street, well off the road. Please practice defensive driving skills, and be aware of cars coming a bit faster than they should around the curve in the road that my boys loved so much.
It was, sadly, necessary to relocate this cache while maintenance was performed on the farm access road. You'll find the cache across the street from the citrus trees now. BYOP.
WATANABE - Japanese, which means “cross border”. The first to be named this were court nobles and samuraiwarriors
TIMBUKTU - French - “well of the woman named ‘Bouctou’ (belly button). Her well was a gathering place for traders and camel caravans. Today it is a town of more than 54,00 people on the edge of the Sahara Desert, in the West African nation of Mali, with summer temperatures roughly the same as the Coachella Valley (110+), and the capital of the Timbuktu Region. It is home to three ancient mosques, and one of the world’s largest collections of ancient manuscripts. Since the early 12th century Timbuktu’s reputation has ranged from highly prosperous to impoverished, from exotic to darkly mysterious, and always as the most remote and inaccessible of all places. Bandits roamed the area, and it has been rumored that it wasn’t until the 1900s that the first European or American to make it back from Timbuktu. In modern times the name has also become a slang term for an extremely distant, desolate, and/or outlandish place.
Be aware that coordinates can bounce a lot in this end of the valley. We took a dozen readings - and got eight different sets of coordinates. We've modified the listing using the satellite image, which should help.