US Trip 2015 – Gathering States

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The start of this year road trip was the Chicago O’Hare Airport, after flying from Norway through Frankfurt and Montreal. We hadn’t much time to spare on any of the connections, so we were a bit worried that we might miss one of them. But the entire trip to Chicago went flawless!

Chicago O Hare

When we landed, a storm had just hit the airport, and all gates were shut down. So we had to wait until they opened again before we could park. The storm passed quickly, and we didn’t see it any more that day. By the time we got the rental car, the sun was shining again.

The plan was to use the first days to “gather a few states”, to get the geocaching map lit up. So we started by driving directly towards Fremont, Indiana, where we had booked the first hotel. We chose Fremont since it was so close to the border between Indiana, Michigan and Ohio.

We found a few caches along the way, mostly on rest areas/oases. We also stopped by a Walmart to get some essential gear for the trip, like duct tape, a cooler, water and snacks and other stuff we didn’t bring from Norway.

It was a long drive after spending so many hours on airports and airplanes, not to mention that we had to get up at 04am in when we left Norway! But we made it, before the weather turned really bad.

The border

The next day, the storm had passed and the weather was again quite nice. We started with the detour to Ohio, and the point where the three borders meet. We made sure we logged at least two caches in each state. Then we made our way back through Indiana and Illinois, following I-80. We found a few select caches, mostly virtuals and at least one cache in each county. As yesterday, we prioritized caches close to the interstate, like rest areas/oases.

Driving into the Oasis

The second hotel was in Le Claire, Iowa. Once we got there, we found a cache in the fifth state that day – a new record for us! We had some time to spare, so we decided to find the webcam cache in Davenport (we had planned that for the next day). I noticed that the webcam stopped working some weeks ago, so I contacted the site webmaster, and he managed to fix the camera in time for us to find it – awesome!

Only two days into our trip, and we’ve already visited five states, and seen a lot! This is going to be one epic journey!

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