Think Globally, Cache Locally

This past weekend, our family was originally scheduled to drive to Missoula, Montana to attend the Missoula Cache machine. In the past few weeks though we started to have second thoughts about the whole excursion. It of course is always fun to go on a trip and I really like trips that were dedicated to the idea of geocaching but with gasoline now hovering around $4.50 per gallon in our area the equations started to not look so good.

I figured on about 1500 total miles of driving in the van which gets about 19 miles to the gallon on the freeway. Lets see, that is 1500 / 19 X 4.50 + probably taking one day off work (unpaid) + hotel + restaurant meals = Forgetaboutit.

In the end we just didn’t see the sense of driving past a zillion caches to find a particular set two states over. Not this time anyhow.

Instead we came up with a simpler but effective plan. My father-in-law Lars Urvina (AKA R-L-Painter) met me at my office in Redmond Friday afternoon and we drove together, just the two of us and did our own cache machine in the Mt. Vernon and Bellingham areas which are less than 100 miles from home. By doing this we could get our big-numbers geocaching fix in without vanishing for several days and without breaking the bank.

I used my newest toy, Microsoft Streets and Trips to plan our routes. It is pretty cool, I can upload a set of cache data into the software and it take a fair shot at solving the traveling salesman problem giving us the most efficient route to follow to hit all the waypoints along our route. Yeah, it all sounds kinda nerdy but it is pretty cool. The software will also give us turn by turn directions to each of the places but I don’t bother with those, I just take the order, plug them into a GPS and let the satellites do all the routing from there.

With the new software though, I am now if full geo-geek mode in case there was any doubt before. I've got databases of caches, routes that I am planning, etc. I spend almost as much time planning to go as I do going.

Here the two routes that we ended up following with some minor on-the-fly modifications.

We were very successful in finding a mess of caches. We cached non-stop from Friday evening into Saturday afternoon, 19 hours total and found a total of 111 caches. What is crazy is when you break that down further and figure out that that means we averaged fining a cache every 10.27 minutes for 19 hours straight. Add to that that a fair portion of those were done in the dark of night, many involved short hikes, etc. That is insane.

The area of Bellingham where we were caching at about 1:00 AM on Saturday was in the middle of a power outage, the sky was overcast and it was just pitch-dark outside to the point where we were having some difficulty navigating. You couldn’t see in any direction beyond the headlight beams of the car. We were just signing a logbook when two police cars rolled up on us and lit us up in their spotlights. It seems that someone must have seen us in the area driving slowly and called us in as possible prowlers taking advantage of the darkness.

We were able to quickly explain what we were doing and the officer checked our IDs and let us be. They always kind of just think you are nuts. I’ve now been questioned by police several times while night caching which is understandable because you do look nuts. To a man, they have all been courteous and have never given me any problems.

All in all, we had a great time and I can’t wait until the next time we can go out again.