We had a very long route planned this day. We needed to get as far as we could. Since we’ve driven parts of this route before and would get an hour extra when entering the Mountain Time Zone, we had planned to drive more than 640 miles / 1 000 kilometers.

Approximate time on road/out caching: 16,5 hours
Total miles driven: 645 mi / 1 038 km
Total cahes found: 34
Total DNF: 1
States visited: Kansas, Colorado
Famous places visited: Mingo (we pointed at it), World’s Largest Czech Egg
Most memorable cache: GC5Q0MP Uh-Oh 😢
Biggest surprise: That we made it to the hotel before midnight
Weather: Sunny, overcast, heavy rain
Highest temperature: 79°F / 26°C
Lowest temperature: 49°F / 9°C
Roadwork: Yes

Let’s start with a detour

Planning this day was hard. A long day, and way too many caches that we wanted to find. So many caches with lots of favorite points, earthcaches, virtual caches and other fun stuff. So we ended up with a long plan. And to make it longer, we started with a detour…

After finding a nice cache on the first rest area along the road, we continued to the next exit, and headed back to the rest area on the wrong side. We wanted to find the two earthcaches there…

Then we did another detour to find a virtual cache.
Yeah, we quickly realized that this was going to be a long day…

A huge egg

We continued doing more detours, to find more virtual caches. The weather was nice, and there wasn’t much traffic (probably because we were driving on the unpaved side roads).

We also visited the World’s Largest Czech Egg in Wilson. We enjoy visiting strange things like this, and since we visited the largest twine ball last year, and the largest twine ball by one man the year before, we had to visit the largest Czech egg this year 😛

A lot of nice caches

Since we had to remove so many caches from the plan, we ended up with a lot of great caches. We’ve also driven most parts of this route before, so we didn’t need to stop in every county.

We quickly learnt that the caches by ottieolsen are caches that are worth a detour. We had several planned for this trip, and we also took the time to find more than we had planned.

When we got to Mingo (we’ve found Mingo before), we had a lot of great caches planned. Not sure how we missed these caches the last time we were here, but I’m glad we took the time to find them this time! Kansas has many great caches! And we had so much fun finding some of them!

The big picture

Once we got to Colby, we had found most of the caches we had planned to find. And after a couple more caches, we finally entered the mountain time zone – one hour more to cache! 😀

The last stop in Kansas was a huge picture in Goodland, at GCZ230 The Big Picture. We really enjoyed the hours we spent in Kansas, and this was a nice last stop before heading to Colorado, and driving a lot longer between the caches.

Just like last year

Just like the last year, it was raining on and off from the Colorado border to Denver. But since we didn’t have many stops planned, it didn’t matter much. And in between the rain, we still managed to find a few caches 😀

It got better…then worse

The weather eventually got better, a lot better! And we had a nice drive to Denver. But then it changed, to the worse. As the sun was about to set, the rain came pouring down.

Driving in Colorado is interesting, before we knew it, we were at 11 000ft elevation (~3 350m). And when we stopped for gas, it was actually quite cold outside 😛

The further the sun got away, the more rain we got (at least it felt like that). Rain, dark roads, roadwork and heavy traffic (lots of bright lights in every mirror) made it a lot more demanding to drive.

No more caches today

But the weather eventually got better, a lot better, and the last part of the drive was much nicer. But we didn’t stop at any more caches (just a rest area with a cache we found the last time we were in the area). The last find was before we got to Denver.

We actually made it to the hotel before midnight, after a very long day. But also a very fun day!

Pictures