US Trip 2015 – Gathering more states, and an old cache

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After arriving in LeClaire, and getting some sleep, we had planned to visit the Antique Archaeology store. But since it didn’t open until 10am, and we got up early (one of the positive side effects of light jetlag!), we had some time to spare. We used it well, found some of the nearby caches and visited the Buffalo Bill Museum. We definitely enjoy the smaller towns and cities the most, so LeClaire was perfect!

Once the store was open, we headed over there. We found the cache earlier, so when we spotted some other geocachers fiddling with the object at GZ, we just had to go over and have a chat with them. Turned out they were headed to the Block Party as well! It was nice meeting you, and thanks for helping us get this awesome photo!

Antique Archaeology

After looking around the store, we continued along our planned route. The plan was to follow the Mississippi down towards the Missouri border, log a few caches there, then head over to Illinois and eventually end up in Peoria. We always try to prioritize virtual caches when out traveling, so we had quite a few of them on the list today.

While stopping at a cache near a war memorial, we noticed a big Mountain Dew truck, and heard something going on at the nearby gas station. So after finding the cache (which took some time), we headed over to see what was going on, and get some gas at the same time. Turned out that the local radio was there together with Mountain Dew. We got to spin the prize wheel, and we both won a t-shirt – nice!

Memorial

The weather was a bit cloudy, but it cleared up later in the day. We made it across the border to Missouri, and added another state to the cache map. Then we headed back into Illinois, and a minor detour to a virtual cache. As usual, I spotted a few other caches along the road, and took some detours on the detour…

The last virtual that day was at the old prison in Carthage. We hadn’t planned to spend much time there, but suddenly ended up getting a nice tour around the old prison. There’s so much history to see and hear about everywhere here!

When we got closer to Peoria, we did a few caches in a trail – on dirt roads. Didn’t take more than a minute or two before the car started to change color…

Looking back...

We didn’t make it to Peoria before after dark, but we had no trouble doing the webcam cache there. Probably easier at this time of the day anyway, since there was almost no muggles around and plenty of parking spaces available.

The next day, we headed towards one of the most famous caches in the area – GC1764C A Real Challenge. Of course we hoped that a glitch in the universe would allow us to find it, but we were mentally prepared for the possible failure ahead. We found, and didn’t find, a few other caches along the way to it, before finally ending up at the place where so many had tried before us.

Can we find it?

It definitely is a nice place for a cache, and we had the entire area to ourselves when we were there. It felt very peaceful! We gave it a good hour, but like so many before us, we just had to give up in the end. We still had a long way ahead of us that day, so we couldn’t spend all day. But who knows, we might be back!

Along the way from Peoria, we stopped at an Tanners Orchard, and bought some fruit. We don’t have anything near this size in Norway, we only have tables on the side of the road selling strawberries and sometimes raspberries and carrots.

Just as the day before, we had a few virtual caches on the list, but we also had GC28 Beverly on the list. After finding a few caches along the road, and driving for a long time on the interstate, we arrived at the parking lot for Beverly.

It didn’t start very well, the first cache we attempted (not on our list) was hiding way to well for us to find. On top of that, we had already gotten like a million bug bites. But no way we’re not doing this after getting this far! The rest of the caches along the way to Beverly was luckily a whole lot easier. But the amount of bug bites kept increasing proportionally.

When we got close enough to almost smell the cache, everything stopped up. Where to now? We couldn’t see any path leading to the cache, so we ended up just walking in the same direction as the arrow on the GPSr. That worked, and once we finally got there, the cache was found within seconds.

Beverly

Once we made it back to the car, a gazillion bug bites later, we headed straight to the Wisconsin border. Almost. We had to do a short detour to get a county lit up. After crossing the border, we found a few virtuals (in the dark), before finally heading towards the hotel in Delavan.

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