Friday, May 21, 2021

Clean Up on Aisle 5


About 18 months ago, I stated playing with a trip plan, hoping to intentionally visit some counties that I'd never visited with my GPS in hand, and even more important, attend a couple major events in Seattle and Abbotsford, BC. Of course, we all know how that went. 


For the past couple years, I've picked away at California counties, including a bunch in Eastern California from my quick trip last summer and a small handful more just last month. Most of what is left is up the central corridor, the area that's typically our third choice for travel. That white area is enough to bug me into trying to clean them up.


In normal years, Oregon gets visited, but you can see the spots that have been ignored, primarily in the corners. There would have been another blank in the SE if it hadn't been for last year's quick trip.


As a Washington native with family ties to the state, I was a bit surprised to see how many counties I was still missing. I'm especially looking forward to getting some caches in San Juan county since I haven't been to the islands for years. Thanks to some other very interesting caches, I'm going to end up with a very circuitous route.


By the time I get finished cleaning up these three states, I should head directly home, but I have two more states where I've found caches in more than half the counties. There's certainly no straight route to getting the remaining 24 counties in Idaho, but I'll get to see lots of backroads and beautiful country in the process.


On last summer's trip I visited all the counties on the west side in Colorado. This summer, I'm hoping to finish up with the east side counties that I'm missing. With BJ's blessing, I'll take a couple extra days to visit the Colby, Kansas area as well, to drop some ink on the world's oldest existing geocache.


Eighteen months of planning and dreaming. There are nearly 1400 caches loaded in the GPS. The route totals about 8500 miles and I expect it to take 36 days. It will certainly be a great test of the Silver Subie's boondocking capabilities. I won't find all the caches I've loaded, but I expect to clean up the white spots in all five states.

Wheels should be rolling June 1st.

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