Making Memories

Marcus finally got to visit the Columbus Zoo, a place he has long wanted to see. 

By Allan Olson

My best memories are those made with my family. On a mostly spur of the moment decision, we made some more such memories this past week on a big road trip – the destination was known to a select few; the kids had no clue.

This road trip ticked off a few bucket list items for the kids, and for me, by attending North America’s largest Geocaching event ever (to date) in Cincinnati, Ohio. Somewhere over 5,000 people attended at the Coney Island amusement park. To be clear, it wasn’t just people from a few states attending; this event drew geocachers from virtually every state in the nation, along with over 30 countries, including Australia, New Zealand, Canada and more. The trip also allowed my wife to do some ancestry research, and Marcus accomplished his biggest bucket list item to date with a visit to the Columbus Zoo.

We took off on Thursday evening after work, even though I would have much rather left at 7 a.m. instead of 5 p.m., there was just too much to do for both  me and my wife. Our destination that evening was Madison, WI, and our only stops were for fuel, bathrooms and snacks. We made it to our hotel just prior to 1 a.m. I knew that we needed to get that far in order to get to where we needed to be by the next night in order to get to the event by the time I wanted the following day.

On Friday morning the kids enjoyed the pool, still not knowing our ultimate destination. I told them this should be an easier day, and we should be at our hotel by 8 or 9 p.m. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

We decided to grab a couple quick geocaches along the way. Our first main target was a geocache named Beverley, the oldest in the state of Illinois, just outside of Chicago. Once we got to the described parking location, Marcus and I took off on the mile round trip hike to make the find. Since this is such an old cache, it had been found multiple times in the previous days, and even earlier that day, because of the influx of people traveling through or intentionally to that location before heading to the same event we were. We made the find, and then we moved on our next stop, which was for my wife – Bohemian National Cemetery in Chicago.

This was a place my wife has been wanting to go to for several years; it is the final resting place of relatives passed on long before she was born. She did the research ahead of time and contacted the cemetery to get the plot and location area. On arrival, we did the footwork and searched all around the area to locate the headstones, but unfortunately, we determined that they must be of the “unmarked” variety graves, as no markers were found. By that time it was nearly 4 p.m. and we still had hours to drive. We needed to get through Illinois and at least deep into Indiana before retiring for the evening. However, we found that rush hour apparently starts early in that crazy city, and it took us at least two hours to get clear of the heavy traffic. In hindsight, we probably should have studied the map  more closely and picked an alternate route to get us around the congestion.

The previous night, while my wife was taking her turn at the wheel, I plotted some points of where I wanted to be Friday night, and once we were a couple hours out, she started making the calls for a room. What she found was no rooms, or we exceeded the occupancy of the rooms available. Finally she scored one. After looking at the map and realizing that the evening was already shot, it was determined that we would have to drive about another 90 miles. Once she booked the room, she asked me if I wanted to know where we were headed for the night. I said ‘Of course,’ so she leans over and says, “It’s a secret!” All I could do was laugh and drive on.

When we crossed the bridge into Kentucky, I was really confused. In my research I apparently had not paid attention to the fact that the venue and the neighboring state were so close, and somehow we managed to score a room only about five miles from the venue, across the river. Once again it was around 1 a.m. before we got into our room, but it was worth it. The kids still had no idea why in the world we were in Kentucky, and a couple didn’t believe us at first when they learned that they had slept right through Ohio. 

I was excited and amused at the same time. Abigail, Marcus and I walked around the parking lots of the two neighboring hotels, checking license plates for a game we were playing and looking at all the geocaching stickers on the vehicles in the two lots.

It was all I could do to suppress my laughter as I heard Marcus and Abigail talking about all the geocaching stickers; Marcus said, “There must be an event nearby…” and he even looked on his phone but somehow only found one event coming up several weeks later.

We finally crawled into bed at about 2 a.m., and I was hardly able to contain my excitement. The next morning, I handed out the geocaching shirts I bought for the kids and they headed down to breakfast. By the time I got there, another guest had asked them if they were going to the event, and then all the pieces started clicking together.

In the morning after breakfast, Abigail and I found the two geocaches in the hotel area, and then the kids went swimming before we headed to the event. At the event, I met up with a relative of a local cacher who couldn’t attend. We took a pic and sent it to him, and then we parted ways to check out the venue.

At the event there was so much to do that in the buzz of excitement, there were many things I missed doing, but those things I did do, I had fun doing. I’m very thankful for Marcus and Alivia because of their brains, and with Alivia’s “little girl cuteness” we were able to weave in and out of people and get some tasks done all the faster.

We left the event about 2 p.m. and headed to Ohio’s oldest geocache about 30 minutes away – a lot of others were there ready to grab it as well. It had just quit raining and lightning was still flashing, so with a couple of kids sleeping I decided to venture out on my own. Thankfully some others were just heading to get it as well, so I tagged with them and we grabbed all the rest of them on the way.

Our hotel destination was just outside of Columbus, nice and close to the zoo. By this point Marcus was very certain that we would be going to the zoo; he had even looked up the hours and other information. That is was what we did on Sunday morning, and he was one happy kid – he finally got to see the zoo that he has wanted to see since at least the third grade, if not longer. We only spent about four hours there, and some areas we zoomed through and a couple we skipped entirely due to the heat and those that were getting migraines because of it. We put in another 4-5 hours on the road before finally settling in for the night at a hotel in Kankakee, Illinois – another purposely staged stop for ancestry the next morning.

On Monday morning, my wife visited the graves of her grandfather, who had passed on almost ten years before she was born, along with the grave of another relative. Then she was able to show the kids the home where her dad was born and raised before he moved to Northern Minnesota.

We finally made it home a little after 2 a.m. on Tuesday. I was ready to stay the night somewhere in Wisconsin, but there was work that had to be done. The kids enjoyed the day at home, however, because even I couldn’t make them go to school on just four hours of sleep – it wouldn’t be fair to them or the teaching staff.

This is just a “nut shell” review of our trip. It was everything I wanted, and it wasn’t. I wanted more time – which we didn’t have. I wanted more geocache finds, but we didn’t have time. Mostly, I wanted to have a great time making memories with the family, which I did, and that’s what was most important.

I’m also pretty confident that the kids had fun as well, even though they spent more time in the car than was ideal.

This week I have two graduations to attend, and an open house for my nephew – the first in the family on my side. From here on, there will be a niece/nephew or one of my own kids graduating every year for at least the next six to eight years. Hang on!

Time is flying by, so get out and make memories with your family while you can.

Please remember to watch out for the buses that will be 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.