Road Trip

My friend Chaosmanor and I are planning a road trip for next month.  Veteran's Day is conveniently near the end of the week, creating a nice long weekend.  Our plan is to head up the 395 on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada, then head over to Lake Tahoe and up to Interstate 80, before heading back down through the central valley of California.

Part of the reason for this roadtrip is to get those last couple of counties that I still need to fill up my state map.  I'm pretty sure we won't get all of them, but I think the two hardest, El Dorado County and Nevada County which are at the north and south end of Lake Tahoe can be had, especially if the weather holds out for us.  I'd also like to clear out a couple more of the DeLorme map pages.

For those of you unacquainted with the DeLorme map series, there are several challenges where you have to find a cache on each page of a DeLorme map.  There are actually three in California, one for the northern half of the state, one for the southern half and another for the entire state.  This past summer, when the Tadpole and I traveled up the 395, we got several of the pages off of the list, but I wasn't paying close enough attention at that time and missed a couple.  I know I can't get them all on this trip, but any serious dent will help.

There is also a challenge cache near Hanford that I'd like to get.  10 year event cache, Chaosmanor and I actually found five different kinds of caches that day, an event cache, a regular, a multi-cache, and earthcache and a mystery cache.  We've since had another day where we found six different kinds of caches.  That challenge cache is high on the list of "must finds" for this trip.

And to top it all off, near that challenge cache, there are two Wherigo caches.  Having never found a Wherigo cache before, these look intriguing.  I'm not really sure how to explain what they are, mainly because I really don't know what they are or how they work.  Chaosmanor has found one, just after he got his new GPSr a couple of months ago, so he's more of an expert.  Geocaching.com explains a Wherigo cache as the following:

>Wherigo is a toolset for creating and playing GPS-enabled adventures in the real world. By integrating a Wherigo experience, called a cartridge, with finding a cache, the geocaching hunt can be an even richer experience. Among other uses, Wherigo allows geocachers to interact with physical and virtual elements such as objects or characters while still finding a physical geocache container. A Wherigo-enabled GPS device is required to play a cartridge.

My particular GPSr is not a Wherigo enabled GPS, so I'll be relying on his GPS.  I'll obviously be writing more about this when we get back from our trip.  I'll expand on each of these in other posts over the next week or so.  Until then, Happy Trails.