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Making Plans
The Road Trip saga continues! Part 2
So we pick out one Earthcache to visit and start to plan, but this time we’ll also be researching to develop an Earthcache as well. We pick Pipestone Minnesota for the Earthcache and the one we want to develop would be in Ponca State Park in Nebraska.
So I start running a pocket query for the area and I notice there is another Earthcache within 15 miles of Pipestone, the Des Moines Headwaters. ”Dear?”… “Forgot it didn’t you?” I bleat out a Tim Allen “huh??”, “My name, you forgot it, so you called me Dear.” Ok, one of those playful moods, I can work with this. Yes! I get the nod to add the headwaters to our trip, but I’m warned we don’t want to put on too many miles with the skyrocketing gas prices. I had the card to play against that, but I was holding it close to my chest for now.
I had been playing with Google Earth and on a whim threw in the Earthcache that was closest, as the crow flies, to our home, Ocheyedan Mound. Hmmm, it is almost directly south of the Des Moines Headwaters, which means it would hardly add any miles at all to our trip! “Dear! We best get this one too!” I yelled toward the other room where she was reading. “I’ll look later.” I had found out a long time ago it’s definitely best not to interrupt the flow of the historical romance novels she prefers. I used the extra time to prepare my case for the additional stop.
“It’s a hill?” “No honey, it’s an Earthcache, it’s more than a hill!” I explain it is a kame’ and that it is the second highest point in Iowa, then I explain what a kame’ is. ”So it’s a gravel hill!” Yeah... I better change tactics, quick, “and it’s the closest Earthcache from here, but if we don’t get it on this trip, we’ll have to make a special trip for just it, all by itself, some other time, so if we go now we save a lot of miles in the future and gas is just going to get more and more expensive.” The card was on the table, and she thought about it and replied, laughing, “You win, you can be Jack and I’ll be Jill.” She was almost prophetic.
Three Earthcaches picked out and now we need to find (said with the big announcers voice) CACHES ALONG A ROUTE, which is neither a complicated nor simple operation depending on what you want to do. To run the cache along a route query you must first create and save a .kml extension file in Google Earth. Not too hard, pick point a, pick point b and Google Earth connects them with the optimal route. The problem is you can’t pick a point c. Also the route chosen by Google Earth may not be the desired route. No problem, there is a workaround. (What follows is the part where if you used the big announcer voice above, would be the required mumble, that is blurted as quickly as possible at the end of a car commercial. Take a deep breath here, you’ll need it.)... JustbreakyourtripdownintosegmentsandcreateandsavethemultiplekmlfilesfindthemultipleWhew… wait a minute, my trip has six segments and I can only run 5 queries a day, AAARGH!
Ok, I got a bit carried away there and to tell the truth, at the time I didn’t know I could export the caches to Streets and Trips. I let both Google Earth and the mapping software pick their optimal route. We had 183 caches within a mile wide corridor of our planned (?selected?) route with a long 4-day weekend to find as many of them as we could.
2 weeks till the trip! We’re really looking forward to a vacation with an overnight stay somewhere other than the hospital.*kaff* Oh no, Oh no, not again! Luckily with some aggressive treatment at the clinic, I have it under control and I feel really good.
One week till the trip! Since we’re going to be in the Ponca area, Vic decides we need to put a cache in the small town her mother grew up in, Obert. I write up a cache description to the effect of “Obert! Named after the water tower, don’t blink or you’ll miss it!” Well, I was put in my place, “You don’t understand, this place is too small to have a water tower.” I replied “You write up the cache description then! I have to redo our CACHES ALONG A ROUTE.” (Wow, did you hear that reverb?)
Schools out! 5 days to go. Vic starts getting all the little things together, working on meal plans, etc. ^cagh^ what was that?? ^cagh^ (pronounced the same as *kaff* but is more petite, think of a cat with a hairball.) “You better get to the doctor!” She stubbornly would not visit a physician, saying it’ll go away. She was right; it did… about a month later. It didn’t affect our trip much, so you’ll be spared the ^cagh^, ^cagh^ that I had to listen to. I bet you’re relieved at that!
One day to go!! Some last minute instructions and a reminder for Mike and Robin, who’ll be taking care of our dog Wedge, Gitchie, whom you’ve met, and our other cats Bernie and Koneko, while we’re gone. I should rerun the queries but don’t because I would have had to start yesterday. Load up the van, cache bag?...check, cooler?.. check, laptop? ..check, table fan??? Yeah we can take that too. Morning comes and we’re.. (Why didn’t you say something before we left?)…
To be continued
A couple of empty-nesters who caught the caching bug not realizing it was incurable. So if we’re found in the woods waltzing with Garmins, lifting lampskirts while tying our shoe or looking for “gum” underneath benches, be sure to stay away... it’s contagious and the only temporary relief can be found in finding bison’s, ammo’s, nano’s, or passing coins and spreading travel bugs!
Publisher's Note: Catsnfish write the periodic column The Adventures of Catsnfish. Subscribe (free) to The Online Geocacher to get an email alert when a new article is published.