The Bikeabout 5 Geocaching Page

I had a secret goal on this trip (not mentioned on any of the other pages, because the muggles wouldn't understand) to find a cache in just about every county I visited, such that I created a continuous line stretching from coast to coast. I'm happy to say I succeeded, and here's a look at my county finds map from the day I finished the trip. Some of those counties in the west are really huge, but the further east I went, the smaller they got. In fact, in Georgia some of them were only a few miles across, making it very difficult to complete my mission. There are a couple of occasions on the tour where I mention "side trips" which were, in fact, detours to grab a single cache in that county just to keep the line going.

I didn't actually find a cache in every single county I visited. Sometimes my route would only barely clip the corner of a county, with no hides nearby. On more than one occasion a county didn't have any caches at all anywhere close, but an adjacent county did, so I'd ride a mile or two off my route to cross over the border and make the find. There's one point in Georgia where I had to ride about 10 miles out of my way, and only entered the nearby county for about a minute, just long enough to make the grab and then head out. The things you have to do for geocaching sometimes! But setting this goal wasn't about signing the log for any particular challenge cache I know of, it was just something different to do that kept my mind off the boredom that inevitably settled in throughout a long trip like this, especially on the tough climbing or headwind days. In past tours, before I had caching to keep me entertained, the ride sometimes became mind-numbingly dull. Geocaching got me looking forward to the next hide, and shunted me off course to find interesting spots I never would've noticed otherwise. There's no way this trip would've been even half as interesting without geocaching, that's for sure. Let's put it this way: almost every historical marker, interesting landmark, or curious town feature you see in a photograph on this blog has a cache nearby that brought me there. So if you're planning any kind of trip or tour, on a bicycle or not, definitely let caching be your guide!

Anyway...here's how I did finding caches along the way:

Day
Finds
 Finds by icon
States
0
25
 22 1 1 1
CA
1
23
 17 1 5
CA
2
19
 18 1
CA
3
14
 12 1 1
CA
4
14
 13 1
CA, AZ
5
5
 5
AZ
6
15
 15
AZ
7
37
 28 1 8
AZ
8
18
 17 1
AZ
9
17
 17
AZ
10
18
 171
AZ
11
7
 7
AZ, NM
12
16
 12 3 1
NM
13
35
 34 1
NM
14
18
 16 2
NM
15
16
 15 1
NM
16
17
 17
NM, TX
17
31
 23 1 3 2 1 1
TX
18
22
 21 1
TX
19
28
 25 3
TX
20
24
 21 3
TX
21
23
 21 2
TX
22
40
 32 3 1 4
TX
23
16
 14 1 1
TX
24
20
 19 1
TX, LA
25
18
 18
LA
26
25
 25
LA
27
10
 10
LA, MS
28
27
 27
MS
29
27
 26 1
MS
30
11
 10 1
MS, AL
31
5
 5
AL
32
15
 15
AL
33
32
 30 1 1
AL, GA
34
14
 12 2
GA
35
12
 11 1
GA
36
20
 19 1
GA
37
13
 10 2 1
GA, SC
38
17
 13 1 3
SC
Total
764
 689 30 15 149 2 2 1 1 1
10 states

Average fnids per day: 19.59
Maximum finds in a day: 40
Minimum finds in a day: 5 (twice, both on days with major bike problems)

I often went out of my way for virtuals, because they're your best bet for taking you to scenic spots and historical landmarks. Same thing with earthcaches, although sometimes they have requirements that can take a while, or may bounce you around to other spots. I also like to do puzzles, but never seemed to have any time in the room at night to work on them (plus sometimes the final location can wind up well off the route)...most of the mystery caches I found were actually challenges (one a 5/5 Fizzy hide). Multis also took too long, so I did them only rarely. Both the webcams were well off track and I had to divert many miles to get them, but they're worth it. There were almost no letterboxes to find, and I had to skip quite a few wherigos because they usually take a while...but I did squeeze one in on the second to last day. The event and CITO were both on Pi Day and I actually had to really work hard to time my trip to make it to those. They were the only events I had any chance of doing any time on this tour.

I picked up a few souvenirs this trip, those being the special Pi Day event and puzzle souvenirs, plus cache finds in new states: Colorado (an earthcache in the Denver airport on the flight to LA), California, Arizona, New Mexico, South Carolina, and North Carolina (at a rest area during the drive home). This leaves me only needing a few states in the west central area of the country to finish off the contiguous USA.

In addition to all the above, I did collect a few benchmarks (just didn't have the time to really hunt for them, but I spotted a few along the way), collected my 9,000th find (at one of the webcams), and also logged two 5/5 hides (both challenge caches). I didn't really try very many high terrain hides simply because I didn't want to injure myself and ruin the trip. Most hides of difficulty 3 or greater were either skipped outright or given a 5-minute once-over before leaving, simply because if I didn't limit the geocaching I'd never make any progress. The rule of thumb was to not let caching alter my daily mileage or schedule, and for the most part I succeeded...in fact, if anything, caching actually sped me up during the middle part of the tour, because I forced myself to ride extra miles on the way to Texas just to get there in time for the Pi Day event.

All in all, geocaching really made this tour about twice as fun as it would've been otherwise. You can bet I'll be doing the same sort of thing the next time I go on bikeabout!

Back to Day 38

Back to Home Page