US Trip 2014 – The last days in Denver

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It’s been a long trip, both in time and distance. Sadly it’s coming to an end. But first we have one and a half day to spend around Denver.

We had planned to use the last full day to visit Boulder and Nederland, which is the Norwegian name for The Netherlands. Yes, we wanted to visit Nederland just because of the funny name. I thought you knew by now that we are crazy 😉

The weather was not the best today either, but it could have been much worse! We went straight to Boulder after getting out in the morning, and the first cache we did was the webcam. We felt kinda stupid when we just stood there in the middle of the sidewalk with a poster in our hand.

We did a few more caches along the road, including a virtual and an earthcache, before reaching Nederland. We had planned to do some more virtuals, but had to skip them due to a closed road.

Me in Nederland

After finding the cache at the welcome sign in Nederland, we decided we had time enough to take another way back to Denver. But first we had to drive a few miles back to find GC34KP9 Cache Across America – Colorado, which we had planned to find when driving back from Nederland.

I enjoy caching across America, so this cache was high on my wanted list for this trip. It was our first CAA-cache, but hopefully not the last!

Cache Across America - Colorado

After finding the CAA cache, we returned to Nederland, found a few caches and got something to eat before continuing towards the county border. Yep, being able to find a cache in another county was one of the reasons we wanted to deviate from our plan.

We ended up just continuing, since it looked like we would eventually end up back in Denver if we followed the road we were on. When we stopped at a gas station to get some ice cream, we noticed a sign saying something like “Timberline Firestation”. When I checked the elevation plot on my GPSr, I got quite surprised! Had no idea we were this high! More than 8850ft (2700m)!

We ended up driving so far out of the route we had planned, that we suddenly had no caches on the GPSr! We were way outside the area we had downloaded. When we crossed the border to yet another county, I could feel the panic creeping. To make it worse, we had no data reception on the phone!

But when we got back to civilization, and had data access again, we quickly found a cache – my first US cache found only with the help from my phone! I guess the app could be good to have sometimes…

We found a few more virtuals, which made up for the ones we had to skip earlier today. And of course those virtuals were in the same county as the previous cache…

When we got back to the hotel, we did a couple Wherigo caches near the hotel, a bunch of traditionals and another cache that’s been Geocache of the Week. Think that’s the fourth on this trip! GC2TD8M Head Case is a cache you should visit if you’re in the area. But be careful, you may not be able to resist the urge…

Head Case

After finding the caches around the hotel, we went to a nearby restaurant to get something to eat – our last night before heading back home.

We had several hours to spend on the last day, since the flight home wasn’t until late in the afternoon and we had a late check out available on the hotel. We decided to drive around in the area to pick up a few more caches before leaving. We just took of in a direction, and ended up on a trail. We had the entire area almost to ourselves, and we could see the airplanes going in and out of the airport.

We drove along fields full of sun flowers, and the weather was beautiful! Near one of the caches, we found this snake skin.

Snake skin

We also saw a tiny tiny snake near that cache, it was too small to photograph (we only had my phone to take photos with, we left the camera with the rest of our luggage at the hotel).

We ended up finding a total of 38 caches before we returned to the hotel, and eventually to the airport. When we delivered the car back to Hertz, it was with more than 6150 miles (9900km) on it than what it had when we picked it up. When you look at how much that car has done in a relatively short amount of time, it’s been a good car!

Many many miles

This has been an amazing trip, we’ve seen and experienced so much! We’ve met a lot of friendly people and we have found lots of caches! I will try to summarize the entire trip in a separate blog post.

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