How geocaching sculpted our roadtrip: Part 3 Southbound

Our route from New Hampshire back to Tennessee took down the busy eastern seaboard. Unlike the Northbound leg of our road trip, I had no geocache planning for this part of the trip. I hadn't searched for caches along our route and flagged the best ones worth stopping for, or even downloaded a single pocket query. We simply drove. At our first rest stop, we were in Connecticut which would be a new state for me, so I convinced my wife to let me use her smartphone to look for a nearby cache. Alas, the closest one was on the other side of a divided and busy highway. Still, the rest stop was cool in that there was a Tesla charging station there and a parked Tesla charging up. I've wanted to see a Tesla for a while, so it was cool to see.

We then drove into New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, into dreary and hazardous winter weather. Snow, rain, sleet, slippery roads. No stopping or thinking about geocaching here. Our next rest stop was in West Virginia, and after filling up on gas, I checked for nearby caches again and was excited to see that the closest cache was one by WVTim! I'd heard about this guy and his caches on forums, Youtube videos, and on the Groundspeak blog, where he won Geocacher of the month in March 2013. This guy is kind of a legend in the area, placing popular gadget caches all over his state. I pleaded with the family to check out the one that was nearby, Name that Tune, and they acquiesced. It was on the way back to the interstate anyways, so we pulled over and walked over to the giant birdhouse, tucked behind a large wooden sign so that the road traffic couldn't see you as you messed with the geocache. The giant birdhouse had a pull-out drawer with a kids xylophone in it. Each note was labeled with the appropriate letter, and a number. In order to open the combination lock on a side door, you needed to play a simple tune, "Twinkle Twinkle", during the last phrase of the sing, you noted the sequence of numbers and that yielded to combination. Simple, not too hard, but fun. We traded some small toys, put everything back the way it belongs, and were on our way in no time. How cool to have a cool geocache stop totally unplanned. An hour later we arrived at our destination for the night, my Aunt and Uncle's house in Virginia.

In the morning, we took it easy, having a leisurly breakfast with my Aunt and Uncle. The weather front that had given us the travel woes on the previous day had brought warm temperatures, it was nearly 60 degrees out, so we opted to go for a hike. My uncle let me load the geocaching app on his smartphone, and we hunted for some geocaches at Shrinemount, Orkney Springs. We ended up doing a 2+ mile loop hike, past the outdoor Shrine, and Labrynthe, then up to the top of the hill. The geocaches out ehre are seldom hunted, and a couple we thought were missing, but we managed to find a couple as well, all small micros with wet logs. The really nice scenary made up for any shortcomings in the geocaching though, and we all had a great hike.

We returned for lunch, and then loaded up in the car for the last leg of our journey, down the 81 to Knoxville. No more geocaching stops, I didn't even check at our rest stops. We just jetted home. The total mileage of our road trip clocked in at 2374 miles, covering . I found 19 geocaches in 6 of the 12 different states we drove through. And I think I managed to find a decent balance of geocaching vs family needs for the trip. I used geocaching to break up the drive with diversion points, and little breaks, but it didn't drive the trip much at all, except for the one leg to find NY's oldest cache. So I'm a happy geocacher, my family is happy from our nice vacataion and we're all exhausted from all the driving. Now when's the next trip?