How geocaching sculpted our roadtrip: Part 1 Driving North

Road Tripping Pro Tip: Keep Kids Happy

This year for the holiday season, we made plans for a family road trip, driving up to the my wife's childhood home and spending Christmas with her side of the family, then scooting over to NH for a New Years-ish week with my side of the family. The route we chose meant visiting lots of family, and also having many geocaching opportunities, but I knew I would have to plan carefully if we were to include geocaching at all. Each day's drive would encompass lots of hours of driving, and while I would be tempted to stop at numerous caches along the way, the only way we would get to our destinations in reasonable time would be to cut out just about all superfluous stops. I would have to carefully choose any geocaches I really wanted to stop at. But I also wanted to have enough flexibility to find geocaches at any unplanned stops (food and restrooms), especially if it meant adding a new state to my stats, and we would be passing through many states that I have never found caches in. So it was a balancing act. When sitting down to actually do the geocaching planning side of the trip, I relied heavily on tips and tricks from another Geocacher Blogger, Dave Dabaere. You can click the link for details, but in a nutshell, I ran many PQs along the highways we were traveling, and looked for high favorite point caches as well as earthcaches and "oldest" caches. It was the looking at old caches that had the biggest impact on my planning since I noticed that New York's oldest geocache, The Spot (GC39), was reasonably close to our planned route. Actually, I rerouted our drive, adding an hour and a half to that days drive just so we could go by this cache, so there, I'm nuts.

When it finally came time to start driving, I had around 50 geocaches identified as ones worth stopping at. There was no way we were going to stop at all of these but my hope was that when we were needing a stop, I would look up the map and see if one of these was nearby. Things didn't quite work out that way. On our first day of driving up through Kentucky and through Ohio to Cleveland, we passed by all of the caches I had identified as being worth stopping for. I did look briefly for a guard rail cache near a location we had stopped for a pee-break, but didn't find it, or spend much time there. On our second day though I got us to stop at a rest stop just before leaving Ohio where I was able to find a nice big geocache full of TBs (GC2ZNZW) and then of course, there was The Spot. I certainly caught grief from my wife for diverting us to this cache. The kids also weren't too happy about it. It was too cold for everyone to be interested in walking to the cache with me (1/4 mile walk from car), and at that point in the day's drive, they just wanted to be at the destination. SO I had a bunch of grumbling from the family as I jumped out of the car and took the dog for a run over to this historic cache. Luckily there wasn't much snow, only a light dusting on the frozen ground, so it was easy to jog down to the cache and search for it. It is indeed at a very cool spot, a nice waterfall, partially frozen was justy nearby, and I made sure to stop at it and get the earthcache info as well as find the old cache. Was it worth adding an hour and a half to our drive though? I definitely thought so, but being a thoughtful guy, I saw that as far as my family was concerned, it was not really worthwhile. This bummed me out a little. I always hoped that my geocaching enjoyment would be shared by the rest of the family, and sometimes the kids do seem to get excited about it, but not this time. This time it was just, "crazy dad, making us take longer for a silly geocache". I got this feeling again once we got to my in-laws house, but it was fleeting. Everyone realized that we had a whole week of hanging out together, and me getting a little geocaching enjoyment by delaying our arrival a few hours was pretty harmless.

 The first leg of our road trip was complete. I had found 3 geocaches in two states, out of 4 states we drove through. I enjoyed all of them, but they left me wanting to do more, and realizing that there was going to be a lot more roadtrip than geocaching for me.