Road Trip

They say planning a trip is half the fun of the actual trip itself. So far, that seems to be true. A caching buddy of mine and I will be taking a few days off work soon to head north to try and find as many new caches as we can that fall within the boundaries of the individual pages of the Northern California DeLorme Atlas and Gazetteer. 


For years, we've had this long-term goal of completing the California DeLorme Challenge (Northern) cache. And we figured while we're at it, why not simultaneously work on fulfilling the similar requirements of the Golden State DeLorme Challenge as well? Note that the latter cache does not allow you to claim caches found for the former, so we'll need to find a separate cache for each page of each DeLorme Atlas book.

To plan our little adventure, we're making use of every tool imaginable, including of course, the DeLorme Atlases themselves, GSAK and the handy little Challenge2 macro (that analyzes your cahce find data and reports/displays your progress on various DeLorme Challenges and USGS Quad Challenges for a range of geographic areas), Google Earth and the Geocaching Google Earth Viewer, and Google Maps to plan our route.


With just a few exceptions, my buddy and I need to find caches in roughly the same polygons as each other. But it becomes a logistical challenge trying to decide the best approach given our limited time frame. For example, should we do a big east and west zig zag across the state, or take more of an up and down approach? The more we delve into this, the more we realize that a straight shot up one route and down another is not an option, as we're going to be forced to venture out, and then double back, to the main trunk line just to make sure we cover as many DeLorme pages as possible. 


And then of course there is the dreaded page 62 to deal with - a DeLorme page that is about 95% Pacific Ocean and 5% land, and is home to a mere two caches:

Regardless, if the actual trip is half as much fun as the planning of the trip, then we're in for one sweet adventure.

Cache On!