How geocaching sculpted our roadtrip: Part 2 Two Roads Diverge in a Wood

The second part of our geocaching road trip was just a single day's drive, between central NY and central NH, and we drove through some really scenic parts of rural Vermont and NH. As with Part 1 of our roadtrip, I had researched cool geocaches to find along our route. After driving through most of NY, we pulled over near the Vermont border for me to find an interesting Virtual cache called a Murder Mystery. It was indeed a pretty neat little spot that would be missed by just about everyone driving by, but honestly one of the reasons I was interested in finding it was because it was by a CO, Briansnat, that I recognized from the geocaching forums. In fact, he's a pretty big personality on the forums, and also someone who I have come to respect and regard as one of geocaching's best ambassadors, at least on the forums. So finding a cache by him was pretty cool. And it was a quick stop, so the family barely noticed.

TBs on Robert Frost

Our next stop was in Bennington Vermont, where we got out to see Robert Frost's gravestone. I'm not big into poetry, but even so I really respect the poetry of Robert Frost. Perhaps that's from my New England upbringing, having to memorize his poems by him. For someone who grew up walking through New England woods, the poetry hits close to home. Seeing his tombstone was a novelty, but it felt strangely right. And it also got us to stop in Bennington which is a really neat town. We ended up driving over to the war memorial next, not to find any geocaches, just to see the impressive Revolutionary War memorial.

After this stop, I really didn't have any cool geocaches flagged on the way to NH, and we didn't make or need any more stops. But this time I didn't feel like I wanted to make any more stops. Just being able to break up the day's drive at one place and find a few cool geocaches was all I needed to feel happy. That's not to say I would love to go back and find more geocaches along the route. Given the chance, I'd be back and finding caches up and down those hills in Vermont and NH. The caches in this area must be right up my alley, nice hikes along beautiful trails.

Rickety looking house in Bennington

Bennington War Memorial

Geocache Maintenance, NY edition

I have two geocache listings in New York (Dangerous Bridges and Adirondak Troll) that I haven't checked on in years. I hid both two years ago, on a previous Christmas trip to see the family, and neither has been found more than 7 times, so they aren't getting found much. But one of them was in a location where there was road maintenance and I was keen to find out how well they are surviving. Also, what CO doesn't want to check up on their caches when they can? Most of my caches are in hard to reach places, or involve tough puzzles, so they don't get found much, but that doesn't mean I don't want to check on them. I will always check on my caches if I am in the area. And what I found was pretty good. The Dangerous bridges cache was a little damp, and one of the swag items had gotten ruined, but it was right where it was supposed to be, and the log was in good shape. I dried it out, refreshed the contents and got it back in play. 

Logbook for Dangerous Bridges

Checking on a cache, a dangerous thing to do

The pristine Adirondak Troll cache

The Troll cache was in even better shape, almost pristine actually. This is a great feeling for a CO, knowing that despite years of weather and finders, the cache is still basically jsut how it was left. Mostly, this is due to how the cache is hidden, in a location almost completely protected from the elements. I should try to make all my hides this well protected.

A Travel Bug Christmas

I picked up several travel bugs on our Road Trip North and then had fun with them during Christmas at the in laws. I'm not the best about helping TBs along with their goals, or taking pictures with them and sharing adventures, but I put in a little effort to spice up these TBs for their owners this Xmas season.

Hammie the Squirrel wanted to get cookies, so he it was in a very fortunate position during our holiday cookie bonanza.

Cache Ram and Michelin Man: Cache Ram was a TB I gave to my brother in law almost two years ago. He then neglected to rop it off in Portland, Me. Luckily he didn't lose it and gave it to me this holiday season, where I promptly placed it in a cache. The Michelin Man was part of promotion going on this fall and I was lucky enough to grab it in a cache near Utica and submit my photo entry just before the deadline.

Stinger the Scorpion next to the Mermaid Cowboy. Man, that cowboy would make an awesome travel bug.

Blaze wants to visit campsites, but it certainly isn't camping season in the Northeast right now. Instead, I thought this photo next to an outhouse was appropriate.

How many TBs can you see?

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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.