The main vacation this year was a four week long road trip, spanning nineteen US states.
We will write about every day of the trip in a series of blog posts, which you will find a list of here later.
The four week long trip is now over, and we’ve seen and experienced a lot!
The trip started in Chicago, but we didn’t spend any time there this time. We went straight towards the Indiana/Michigan/Ohio border, to get a few more states crossed of the map. We did some more detours, to find caches in Iowa and Missouri, before heading towards West Bend, Wisconsin. After the mega, we headed towards Yellowstone and Seattle.
After the event weekend in Seattle, we drove along the coast down on Highway 101 and Highway 1. We hosted an event in San Francisco, and attended a CITO event in Lompoc. After getting to the end of Highway 1, we headed towards Joshua Tree National Park and from there to Las Vegas. While in Vegas, we also visited Death Valley National Park.
From Vegas, we continued towards Utah, and all of the Mighty 5 National Parks there. The trip ended in Denver, where we had just enough time to attend an event before we had to head towards the airport.
We drove around 12 028km (7 473mi) in total. Got a flat tire few feet from a virtual cache, and had to do a one hour detour to change car (the tiny spare tire wasn’t good for much). Other than that, we didn’t experience any problems.
We found a total of 940 caches (55 DNF) in 143 counties in 19 US states. That is 151 caches more than we had planned to find! 104 of them were virtuals, 92 of them earthcaches, and 9 of them webcam caches.
We’ve attended the West Bend mega event, the last Block Party, Going APE mega event and a few other events along the road. We’ve met a lot of nice people, and maybe we’ll meet some of them again some other place in the world?
We’ve taken a whole lot of photos, will upload a lot of them together with the logs.
We’ve had mostly good weather, some rain in Seattle and a few days with clouds and light rain, but nothing we really can complain about.
The states we visited:
- Illinois
- Indiana
- Michigan
- Ohio
- Iowa
- Missouri
- Wisconsin
- Minnesota
- North Dakota
- Montana
- Wyoming
- Idaho
- Washington
- Oregon
- California
- Nevada
- Arizona
- Utah
- Colorado
The National Parks we visited:
- Theodore Roosevelt National Park (very quick stop)
- Yellowstone National Park
- Redwood National and State Parks
- Joshua Tree National Park
- Death Valley National Park
- Zion National Park
- Bryce Canyon National Park
- Capitol Reef National Park
- Arches National Park
- Canyonlands National Park
The main highlight in the national parks was hiking to Delicate Arch in Arches NP before sunrise. When we arrived at the top, there wasn’t a single person around – we had the area entirely to ourselves! It was definitely worth getting up at 04:15 for that!
Visiting Death Valley and experiencing temperatures as high as 52C / 125F was definitely something different than we are used to!
Other interesting places we visited was (in random order): The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota, lots of big statues in North Dakota (each of them biggest of their kind) and we drove through two trees.
Watching the fountains of Bellagio from our room in 20th floor was also something special.
We’ve had an amazing and awesome trip, and we brought home a lot of great memories!
I’m quite sure we can call ourselves road trip heroes now (ref. this years August challenge) 😀
Read more detailed about our trip here:
- Gathering states
- Gathering more states, and an old cache
- Attending a mega event and reaching a major milestone
- Heading west
- Yellowstone
- Heading to Seattle
- A weekend in Seattle
- A Coastal Drive
- A visit to the City by the Bay
- From coast to desert
- A journey to a hot place
- Red Rock Country
- The last days of this trip
