US Trip 2017 – Day 7 – Finishing the Jasmer

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This was a long day on the road, that took us from Columbus West, Ohio to St. Louis, Missouri. We also completed our Jasmer grid, and visited a small town full of big things.

Approximate time on road/out caching: 16 hours
Total miles driven: 474 mi / 762,8 km
Total cahes found: 40
Total DNF: 1
States visited: Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri
Famous places visited: Casey
Most memorable cache: GCC7 Fowler Park Wilderness Stash
Biggest surprise: That we, despite the long drive, managed to find more caches than planned in our already ambitious plan
Weather: Overcast, rain
Highest temperature: 75°F / 24°C
Lowest temperature: 64°F / 18°C
Roadwork: Yes

A long way ahead of us…

We had a long way ahead of us, and we managed to get up and start exactly on schedule (which was a bit later than the previous day, and that’s probably the reason that we made it 😛 ). This might sound crazy to some, but this is how we like it.

We had mostly new counties planned for the first part of the day, since we wanted to get to GCC7 as quickly as possible. Several of the caches we had on our list, had many favorite points. And that’s how we ended up with the ambitious plan. We simply couldn’t get ourselves to remove any more 😛

A nice welcome center

We stopped at a combined museum and Welcome Center in Richmond, Indiana.

The welcome center itself was kinda nice, but what made it awesome, was the cache inside!

Ooops

We made it past Indianapolis without any issues, still only stopping mostly at caches in new counties. But then, when approaching a mystery we had solved, something didn’t feel quite right. Why did we drive through a county without stopping? A quick look at our plan revealed that I had put the wrong cache into the GPSr, so we had skipped a cache. Ouch, what now?

Driving back to that cache wasn’t an option, way too far. So we started looking at the map, the big map…

We collect state highway maps (dunno why), and now the one we recently picked up actually came in handy. After checking both the paper map, and my GPSr (I have county information saved for each cache), we found a solution. There was one cache, only that one, just on the other side of the border. Not too far away. Let’s go!

That mistake did cost us a lot of time, but we found the cache 😀

Time to hike

We finally arrived at the parking we had planned for GCC7 Fowler Park Wilderness Stash. We did a lot of research, and found a spot we thought would be ideal for getting to the cache. But we also had several alternatives if this one should turn out to not work.

But it worked! The weather was a bit unstable, and it was raining earlier. So we brought our humongous Maid of the Mist ponchos from Niagara Falls, and hit the trail.

There wasn’t a single muggle around, and we had the entire trail to ourselves. Almost. Plenty of mosquitoes, and they were very happy to see us. The feeling was not mutual…

We eventually made it to GZ. We spent quite some time, mainly because we were struggling with the heat inside the ponchos (which we put on in an attempt to keep the mosquitoes out). But we eventually found it! The last cache we needed to complete the Jasmer! (well, technically it wasn’t, since we still hadn’t found a cache hidden in August).

This time, it’s for real!

Shortly after getting back on the road, we passed a rather new cache. I don’t remember why, but I decided to turn around and give it a try. Once we found it, we finally completed the Jasmer for real! So the real last month we completed, was August 2017 😛

We did a quick detour to Terre Haute, to find the earthcache and the virtual cache there. After our short visit to Terre Haute, it was time to head west, and cross over to the Central Time Zone. We got an hour more to cache! 😀

Small town, huge things

After a few more caches in new counties, we did the detour to Casey, Illinois. The small town full of big things. Sadly there’s not much caches around there, but there is one – and it’s a good one!

After finding the cache, we spent some time checking out the big things.

Places like this are the ones we remember the best. A small town with a huge personality.

Even more counties

By the time we left Casey, it was starting to get late, and we still had a lot of miles to cover. And we had some counties we wanted to turn green.

Most of the caches was either easy, very nice or both. But the two last ones were a bit too difficult. We didn’t give up, and ended up finding every cache we wanted to find (besides the one DNF early in the day).

We made it to the hotel before 11pm, and got to enjoy the magnificent view from our room.

Pictures

GALLERY

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