The Online Geocacher
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Thu, Aug 21, 2008

Well there were two choices, but it looks like a few more earthcaches have been published, two in our home state (one was mine) and two in Kansas. We had planned on getting what was at the time Kansas’ only Earthcache then swinging into Missouri to pick up another state for our stats while trying to keep our finds under 500, and a week or two later, heading north for a Nebraska Earthcache called Ash Falls for our 500^th cache find and earning the Gold Earthcache Masters pins.

Two days before the trip I discover the new EC’s and do a bit of research... hmm, one of the new EC’s, Konza Prairie, is roughly 50 miles west of the Roving Boulders cache, hmm again, gonna have to think on that.

The other new Kansas EC was out of the question for this trip but I have to mention it here as the cache page is hilarious. All of the information and presentation is extremely well done and researched. The explanations of the logging requirements have stick figure illustrations taking the measurements with a rather vicious, yet comical looking fish awaiting the stick figures misstep. I will definitely visit the GC1DZ98 EC in the future. Can’t pass up good humor!

Ok, my thinking on it doesn’t do any good; it has to be discussed with Vic. The route and CACHES ALONG A ROUTE (this big voice is getting to be annoying) for our initial plan gave us an estimated drive time of 10 ½ hours and well over a hundred caches to choose from. I then rerouted along Vic’s suggestion (but didn’t run the queries) and trimmed off almost 2 hours, but with cache hunts and other breaks we were still looking at a good 12-hour or more round trip.

We wanted to do just the day trip because of the warmer weather and the previous experience with Van Camp. Well, going for the Konza Prairie EC would mean adding another couple of hours onto the trip, plus we would have to find caches to bring us to 499 before getting there (we’ve learned to not count on x number of caches being found on a trip, see “On the Road Again”), and if we were having a 'DNF day' it could add some major time. So we decided to stick to the initial plan but told ourselves to be flexible and have contingency plans in place as well.

I’m going to try to sneak this past the announcer. I ran the caches along a route queries and we had 42 to choose from in a mile-wide corridor. (Whew, looks like the announcer wasn’t paying attention.) I get all the data loaded into the GPS’s, Palm and laptop, make sure the route is mapped; pushpins saved and try to get a good night's sleep.

The next morning we feed the animals, tell them to watch the house, grab the bags and we’re cruising by 6 a.m. Sailing south, we’re singing with the radio and watching the morning fog lift. This is travelin’ in my opinion. Wake before dawn, get on the road, take in the views, stop for every historical marker or cache along the way…..and belting out the oldies. I’d be really jammin’ if the van had a CD player! There’s a rest stop coming up and we’re ready for it, cause travelin’ also includes coffee by the bucket. The rest stop also holds 2 caches, our first of the day.

Have you ever made a poor decision and have it slap you in the face? I did but it was more subtle, kind of a water torture instead of a slap. I had made the conscious decision not to wear my caching boots that are a tad bit tight because of how long the day was going to be. Instead I wore my old worn-down-tread, untreated-leather comfortable-as-an-old-friend shoes. The toes of my shoes had gotten damp as we made our way to the back of the rest area, we looked and looked and just didn’t see the cache. We head for the second one, find it, but the walk had wet all of my shoes by then. Vic’s shoes seem to be resisting the invasion of dew better than mine. We head back to find the first cache, grab it this time and my shoes are now soaked through and actually have a little puddle on top waiting for its chance to seep in and wick along my socks, just to make sure my ankles could be wet and miserable as well. Squish squish, all the way back to the van.

Ok, time to change my shoes and socks… *Buzz* Wrong! These were my backup shoes… I left the boots at home, and changing socks would just soak another pair. Take them off and let them dry? Not when we might stop every ten minutes or so to seek a cache. I could feel my feet wrinkling into prunes. But hey! We just added Missouri to our state stats! Life is good.

St. Joe, the Pony Express, the house of Howard, who was shot by the coward (we didn’t go in the house or we would have checked to see if there was a saddle we could measure) and other in-spire-ing places. Here we ran into muggles at the Glore Psychiatric Hospital and Museum. I spot the cache and, nodding to Vic to make sure she knows where it is, provide cover by taking pictures of a neat water feature. Cache in hand she goes to the nearby gazebo to log and trade swag. Ready to put it back, another set of muggles shows up so we wait them out and they drive off… to park just the other side of us. When they got out, I glimpsed a GPS and told Vic to introduce herself. She did and we had a nice little chat with two cachers from the KC area.

On to Atchison for our first Kansas cache; a virtual of Amelia Earhart’s childhood home. We had tuned in to a local station recently on the radio and, gee, we are just in time for the Amelia Earhart Day celebration. Luckily the parade hadn’t begun yet and we were able to make our visit, pet the greyhound guardians (We like guardians!) and be off before traffic got snarled up. We stop at our next cache long enough to make sandwiches and we eat as we roll. We just passed our sixth hour on the road.

Pretty quiet until we get to the Topeka area. We did see some sedimentary exposures along the highway road cuts and commented that since we’ve started Earth caching we have a much greater appreciation and understanding of those features. A cache we had found when we got to Topeka gave parking coordinates at a nearby movie theatre.

Well, it was opening weekend for “The Dark Knight” and there was no spot to be had… but there was a wonderful exposure of slate and limestone right behind the parking lot. Please someone, turn this into an Earthcache! Maybe call it “Now Showing! The Pleistocene Epoch!” or something else clever.

After seeing there was no place to park and it was 95 degrees, Vic gladly volunteered to wait in the van while I went downhill to the wooded area. Too bad, she missed out on the biggest cache container I have ever seen. I left our biggest swag item, a McToys Buzz Lightyear, 12 inches tall and in the original bag. He had room to fly to infinity and beyond inside that cache.

Next, the Roving Boulders. There is a small graveyard (two stones) near the parking area and we go over to read the stones before following the trail. After a short distance we pass a couple dozen old farm implements all neatly arranged in rows. I tell Vic there are all sorts of graveyards here.

A little further and we come to a wooded area with a rocky path leading through it. These are the roving boulders. Sandstone erratics in all shapes and sizes, many with holes worn in spots. Pretty neat, I held one small rock with holes up to my eye and paraphrased a line Chief Dan George had in ‘The Outlaw Josey Wales’... ”All I have is a piece of sandstone, but it’s not for throwing, it’s for looking through.” Yeah, Vic has heard variants of that for years, but it never stops me. And she always replies ”You’re weird!”

I’m sure you all remember Vic’s intolerance to heat. Not one complaint at all, this entire trip. We had been getting back to the van before she ever got overheated, until now. It was 96 degrees out and with the walk into the cache area, which was wooded and shady but had no air movement, it was starting to get to her. We needed to look for evidence of glacial travel and to determine the direction of the movement so it took a little bit. By the time we got back to the van her legs were already beginning to show a heat rash. This was cache #494.

Decision time! Go for 5 more caches and hit 500 at the Konza Prairie, or head home and make the Ash Falls Fossil Beds our 500^th in a few weeks. Toss a coin? Rock paper scissors? Eenie Meenie? Vic was hot, so there was only one way the decision would go. Our son mohjoe’s birthday was the next weekend and she hit upon the bright idea of giving him an Earthcache icon for his birthday. Works for me! “Point the van north, Honey, We’re homeward bound!”

13 hours, 15 caches and a very enjoyable but tiring caching day. Can’t wait for the next weekend!