The trip from Colorado Springs to our hotel in Denver could take about 2,5 hours, if we hadn’t been geocachers.

We had planned to find 20 virtuals today, and a few other caches. But first, we had to visit Garden of the Gods and find a few of the caches we had planned to find yesterday.

We started in Garden of the Gods, and stopped by the Visitor Center on our way in to the park. After getting even more geology books to our growing collection and taking some photos, we continued into the park.

We ended up finding three traditionals and two earthcaches in the park. We didn’t want to do all the hikes, since we had a lot of caches planned for the day. But we did get some nice photos!

When I planned this day, I only looked roughly at the map. That was the first mistake I did. Turned out that a cache just 1 mile away took 3-4 miles along the road to get to! But we kept on going, after all, we had the whole day!

After finding the first virtual and a letterbox, we had to give up a cache. There was no way we could figure out how to get to it. We just ended up in a dead end road. When we got closer to the next virtual, GC5315 Little Arch, I discovered the second mistake I had done while planning. It turned out that we had to do some hiking to get to this cache. Not that we mind that, we just hadn’t planned it today.

But, we found a nice parking spot, right next to a fireman being interviewed by a TV reporter. We made sure to be quiet, to not disturb them, and got on our way towards the cache. The terrain was easy, and once we got there, I can say it was worth it! We even got to find a few other traditionals along the way.

The next three virtuals were easy, then it got a lot harder! GCB55D Alan’s Memorial was probably the hardest cache we did that day. The description said it was about 3 tenths of a mile hike, so when we parked about 3 tenths of a mile away, we thought we had found the perfect parking spot.

We were wrong.

The first feets started well, the remaining distance to the cache decreased, but then it got worse. We decided to do as we often do, walk straight towards the cache. That brought us up a steep hill and onto a small top. The cache, yep, not up there!

Continuing in a straight line towards the cache was not an option, since it was way too steep on that side and completely overgrown. So we had to just walk the only way we could. If we leave the GPSr out of the picture, you could say we almost got lost up there… We stumbled over a skateboard on the top, a strange place for skateboarding!

We followed what looked like a trail, through lots of bushes, and eventually made it towards a bigger trail. We even got to find a cache along the way!

Eventually, we made it to the virtual! We were exhausted!

Going back the way we came was not an option, so we continued down the trail we were on. We found a couple more traditionals, before reaching the road. And then it started to rain! Turned out we had parked on the wrong side of the curve. We made it back to the car without getting too wet.

The next virtuals was a whole lot easier, and some could even be done from the car! And some required us to get out and walk in the rain.

Getting the Nüvi to navigate correctly to all of them was not always easy, sometimes it tells us to drive straight through a gated community.

The weather became wetter and wetter for every mile we got closer to Denver. But we still managed to find all the caches, except one. There was no way we were going to park on the side of a busy highway in the rain!

We visited a surprisingly high amount of cemeteries and other grave sites. The last one we had on the list, turned out to be closed! And it was starting to get dark. With the help from our trusted DSLR, we managed to take a photo of the info we needed – even though we couldn’t see it properly, the camera could!

We got to the hotel before it was too late, and could get some much deserved rest. Since this was the last hotel of the trip, we had booked a room with a Jacuzzi!