Geocaching Road Trip

Geocaching Road Trip


Nikolai was cracking the combo lock at a geocache we found in Battle Creek Regional Park in Maplewood on Saturday.

By Allan Olson
It was a road trip to remember last Saturday. Nikolai and I were up and on the road before even the birds – but not the deer. We left home about 5:30 a.m., with our first destination being Bemidji, where we were to meet our ride to the big cities to the south. As I said, we beat the birds up, but the nocturnal deer hadn’t gone to bed yet and I had to hit the brakes a time or two on that short jaunt to town to avoid hitting them.
We met at our pre-determined meeting spot just prior to 6 a.m., and were on the road and ready for a day of geocaching. For Nikolai and I, we were going to our first geocaching mega-event. 
The day was young as we headed southbound for the big cities, but we had time to find some caches in a couple little towns along the way. Our first stop was near Motley; our driver remembered a geocache that was close by and was even able to find the sideroad pull-off in the dark. Lucky for me, he even remembered where the cache was located, so it was a quick grab-and-sign, and we were back on the road. We were not so lucky at the next stop, the cache was likely missing, because our driver had found this one before, too, and it wasn’t there. 
Moving on, we managed to find a couple and miss a couple others before we arrived at the first geocache that we really wanted to get. We met up with five other seekers at this location to help try find it, but there would be no joy for us. An hour later we gave up and headed to another location. This one was tricky but with some critical thinking from Nikolai and another, we found it. After that, our next stop was the event at Battle Creek Regional Park in Maplewood, 200 miles from home. At the event we visited with a few geocachers we had met in the past, and met some others from our neck of the woods before we hit the trails in the park to grab a few more caches before we would have to start the journey north again.
A couple hours later we tried some food at what turned out to be a “less than ideal” establishment. That resulted in another stop much earlier than planned on the way home for some better food. We were just barely out of the cities on our way home when we looked at each other and said, okay, we really need to find that one that eluded us earlier, so we made a quick detour back into Coon Rapids for one last ditch effort on that tricky hide. The three of us spent another 30 minutes trying to shake the cache loose out of the tree from wherever it had to be nestled in those branches, but it just wasn’t meant to be for us, and we finally turned our compass back north. 
We made a few more stops to make some more finds for our numbers before reaching our destination at about 10:30 p.m., some 16.5 hours after leaving. We had a great time, but we were exhausted. Nikolai was so tired he went straight to bed and didn’t get up for nearly 12 hours.
On Sunday, it was my wife’s turn to leave for the cities, this time with our oldest daughter for another doctor’s appointment. I was left with the other kids and a dog. After my wife left, I decided I needed a nap. That plan worked for about an hour, before the phone rang and woke me out of my slumber. Since I needed to go to Cass Lake that afternoon anyway, I guess it was time to get up. While I snoozed, Marcus and Alivia had decided to play some games in the living room downstairs and completely messed everything up, making for one very unhappy parent. As I exited the house, I left instructions with them to get everything cleaned up before I got back. Since they failed to follow orders, they got to go to bed early, and and I enjoyed a nice noise-free evening reading a book.
Our plans for the next two weekends should be obvious to anyone who has read my columns for the last few years – it’s deer hunting season! I’m excited about this year’s hunt, and optimistic that I will get the opportunity to shoot something with antlers, and even more important that for the third year in a row, I will be joined by my oldest son on another hunting season adventure.

Please remember to watch out for the buses that are carrying our most precious cargo. Also snap a photo or two to preserve a lifetime of memories. Thanks for reading, and have a great week! Feel free to drop me a line at cltimes1@arvig.net or stop by the office for a visit. Be safe hunting!

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