California is our 49th state (includes DC, so Nevada is 50th and Arizona, 51, will be the last new state on the trip, although we do plane on returning to Colorado, Wyoming and Utah to finish up).
After an afternoon of flying to and about the San Francisco area, we find ourselves arriving in Monterey as sunset approaches which is excellent as this is the official cache we've picked for California and it suggests visiting at sunset if possible.
We found the sim coords for this cache with no problem, and although the sim scenery is not real accurate to true life, it does seem loosely suggestive of the area. Its pretty neat to be flying about the Monterey Penisula and see from the air the many places that we've visited a number of times on the ground. While small details are not accurate on the sim, the overall feel and flavor of the area hits the mark as well as anywhere we've virtually flown. We recall several times being at a monument on the hill inside the Monterey Presidio from which you can look over to the Monterey Penisula airport and watch planes landing and talking off. As we fly about now, the airport looks just like it did from that hill and we are anxious to land their for the night. We understand that a Navy P3 Orion will be made available to us in the morning for our flight down the coast and to the Sierra Nevada.
On the way we worried we'd not be in time for the sunset but actually had to circle about the area for 23 minutes to watch the entire sunset. The sim showed the sky to be very much like we've seen it from the cache several times during our real life sunset watches there.
Unlike all the other caches, we've virtually visited on our around the world trip, we are going to claim this as a find because we have actually sat on the bench many times, and we know the answer to the question. Thanks for the great job setting up the cache and for letting us visit it in real and now again in virtuality.