US Trip 2017 – Day 2 – Across New York

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The route this day took us from Dover, New Hampshire to Rochester, New York. A lot of driving on I-90…

Approximate time on road/out caching: 16 hours
Total miles driven: 416.8 mi / 670,8 km
Total cahes found: 28
Total DNF: 2
States visited: New Hampshire, Vermont, New York
Famous places visited: None
Most memorable cache: GCGPW1 UofR Meridian
Biggest surprise: The never ending aisles of fun stuff in the store near GC1XQFF Hoosick’s Four Corners
Weather: Sunny
Highest temperature: 88°F / 31°C
Lowest temperature: 70°F / 21°C
Roadwork: Yes

Using the jet lag to our advantage

We don’t feel much jet lag when traveling from east to west, but it does help us get up a bit earlier in the morning the first few days.

So we got up early, to get an early start on a long day. We had a lot of distance to cover and some caches we wanted to find. The caches on our plan were mainly there either because they had a lot of favorite points, because they were webcams or virtuals or because we needed them to get a find in a county.

Our second live broadcast

While finding GC2Y6R6 Geocaching Runs On… – French Vanilla we tested live broadcasting on our Facebook page for the second time. We did a quick contest for the followers back home, asking which famous waterfall we were headed towards.

The next cache on the list was the webcam GCMYKV Yankee Ingenuity Webcam, which worked so flawlessly that no ingenuity was needed.

What a view!

A few caches later, we found ourselves in yet another new state – Vermont. We stopped at a roadside cache, and were rewarded with a magnificent view! We spent some time there, taking photographs, shopping in the gift shop and finding both caches at the viewpoint.

New York, here we come!

From Vermont, we continued towards the New York border. We’ve been to New York before, but that was before caching. So this was yet another new state for us. We missed the sign at the border, so we were a bit surprised when we suddenly realized that we were in New York already.

The first cache turned out to be GC1XQFF Hoosick’s Four Corners. Finding the cache took a while, due to the high muggle activity. After signing and replacing, we went inside the store next to the cache. They had so much fun stuff in there, and the store went on forever and ever with endless amounts of small and tiny corridors and rooms.

Another Geocache of the Week

We continued west, stopping at a couple virtuals (including the one near Albany Airport) and a bonus cache (what we call caches we find that are not on our plan).

One of the caches we had on our plan, was GC56Y0Z Doctor Who #13. That cache was on our plan for two reasons, we are Dr. Who fans, and it was the Geocache of the Week in August 2014. We try to find Geocache of the Week-caches whenever we can, so this one was a must do today!

Just the look of the cache made it worthy of all the favorite points! Sadly it was kinda broken when we got there, but after thinking hard and long, we found a solution. By destroying one of our TOTTs (instead of destroying the cache), we managed to create a new TOTT, which was exactly what we needed. So even though the cache wasn’t in perfect condition, this was an awesome experience!

Time to get on the thruway!

We have accumulated quite a few miles on American roads during our travels. But toll roads are not something we have seen much of. Usually we’ve managed to avoid them completely when driving in this country. This trip was different. It looks like the entire Eastern US is full of toll roads. We are used to toll roads in Norway, so the cost doesn’t bother us that much. It’s more the hassle of actually having to drive through the plazas (even though we had E-ZPass).

So for the rest of the route today, we had planned just the bare minimum we needed to get the counties along the road. The large amount of rest areas and travel plazas really helped a lot towards this goal, and we only had to do one tiny detour (lots of DNFs on all caches on the rest area in that county).

While looking for GC4GXYH Another History Stop, we saw this tiny snake, very close to the cache. The snake was a lot nicer to us than all the mosquitoes…

We quickly understood that it’s construction season, and that we should expect lots of roadwork. Luckily for us, it didn’t slow us down very much, traffic wasn’t that bad.

Let’s walk in circles!

The last cache of the day was GCGPW1 UofR Meridian, a webcam at the University of Rochester. Whenever we plan webcams on a university campus, we research available parking. We had done the same here, and knew exactly where to park, which is nice when you arrive as late as we did (10pm). What we didn’t know, was that there would be confusing road work nearby. But after a few detours, we arrived at our planned parking.

Then the real trouble started. We couldn’t get the camera to work! When traveling in the US, we buy a prepaid sim card for our phone. We use AT&T GoPhone (or PREPAID as it’s called now, they changed the name a week or so before our trip), so as long as we’re not in the middle of nowhere, webcam caches should be easy to do. This one wasn’t.

At first we thought it was the phone that was the issue, so we tried with the computer. Still nothing. So we gradually started to accept the fact that we might just had to give up on this one. We tried installing java, switching browser, still nothing. Then, for some reason, I got a hunch. What if, hmm, let’s try this. I ran the URL through a online screenshot tool, and sure enough – there it was! The webcam worked!

Turned out that it was AT&T that was messing with us, apparently this type of streaming webcam just didn’t work with AT&T (even with the stream saver turned off). So we had no other choice than to switch on the super expensive roaming on our Norwegian phone. That did the trick, and the webcam worked!

Since this already had been so easy, we decided to make it a bit easier, by walking in a huge circle to get to the webcam. Instead of just walking directly to it…

Now we really deserved some rest and some sleep. So we headed straight to the hotel after this. We took the short route back to the car…

Pictures

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