US Trip 2017 – Day 12 – Heading north

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We didn’t have a very long route planned for this day, but we had a lot of caches we wanted to find. Several virtual caches, a few Utah GeoTour-caches and a couple caches we didn’t have on our GPSr while doing a trail several years ago.

Approximate time on road/out caching: 13.5 hours
Total miles driven: 292.3 mi / 470,4 km
Total cahes found: 74
Total DNF: 4
States visited: Utah
Famous places visited: None
Most memorable cache: GC5HA8V Utah GeoTour-Iron – Parowan Gap Petroglyphs
Biggest surprise: The low amount of traffic and roadwork
Weather: Sunny, partly sunny, cloudy, windy
Highest temperature: 99°F / 37°C
Lowest temperature: 64°F / 18°C
Roadwork: Yes (but a lot less than on previous days)

A very late start

We got a very late start, and didn’t leave the hotel until a little over 9am. That’s very late compared to other days on this trip. But it didn’t matter that much, since we didn’t have that much driving ahead of us today.

We wanted to find as many GeoTour-caches and as many virtual caches as we could. So instead of driving the shortest route, which would be to just follow UT89 north, we headed south a bit so we could take the road to Duck Creek Village. We stopped at only one cache before Duck Creek Village, and the next after was in Cedar City.

A lot of virtuals

We started the day with more driving than caching, but once we got to Cedar City, that changed. We found four virtual caches and one traditional in and around Cedar City. And the weather was beautiful!

Parowan Gap

After one more virtual, the next stop was Parowan Gap – and the three caches there (one virtual, one earthcache and one GeoTour-cache).

We started with GC5HA8V Utah GeoTour-Iron – Parowan Gap Petroglyphs, which turned out to be real hard to find. We almost gave up, several times, but I just had to check once more. After checking once more a few times, we finally found it! 😀

The other two caches there was a lot easier 😛

Got milk? / Where’s the Beef?

After Parowan Gap, and another cache along the road, we did the Got milk? and Where’s the Beef-trail. Almost no traffic, nice and easy caches and only one DNF. We finished all of them in two hours (including one that wasn’t a part of the trail).

More special caches

After the trail, and a couple other caches, we found another GeoTour-cache, GC6PAVV Utah GeoTour-Beaver – Territorial Courthouse. We also found GC142KX CAU-Beaver Co. Hopefully we’ll be able to finish the CAU-series in a few years.

And a couple caches later we stopped at a cache we’ll remember for a long time. Mostly because of all the caches we’ve had to visit in order to qualify – which we did a few days earlier on this tripGC1Q51K Jasmer Challenge III – Utah was the first Jasmer-challenge we found and logged 😀

A few caches later, including GC114R8 Utah GeoTour-Millard – Territorial Statehouse, it was finally time to find GCX1PB Cache Across America – Utah. We should have found this one the last time we where here. But we didn’t. Now we were determined to find it, even though our GPSr didn’t quite agree with us. The Nüvicam tried leading us to the wrong side of the interstate. Luckily for us, all we had to do was to walk through the underpass.

44FRFC

We visited the 44FRFC, or the 44 Frontage Road Fun Caches, several years ago. And since the GPX from route function on geocaching.com doesn’t always give you all the caches, we ended up missing a few. I’ve wanted to find these caches every year since, but we haven’t been close enough until now. And now we finally found all the ones we missed the last time! 😀 We also managed to convert a previous DNF to a smiley 😀

More virtual caches

The rest of the day consisted mainly of more virtual caches, with a few traditional caches in between. And with the help of our flashlights, we managed to find the rest of the virtual caches we had planned.

We ended up almost giving up one of the traditional caches near one of the virtuals, since we only found a wasp nest. But turned out that we were looking in the wrong place 😛

You could also argue that we had booked the wrong hotel, since the last cache we found was actually inside the hotel next to ours…

Pictures

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