Our May & Early June Road Trips

Other than birthday celebrations and activities with the grand kids, we have been geocaching road tripping. We've had several goals we have wanted to reach when we got home this spring. One was a milestone of 100 Multi Caches. For non-cachers, multi caches have two or more steps or stages, usually solving some sort of puzzle or doing some research, before finding the cache at the final location. We accomplished that goal by traveling to area cemeteries. We had around 25 to complete successfully, and we did before the end of May.

Once that goal was checked, we worked on the next one: 1080 geocaches from the southern tip of SD/IA north along the border of SD/MN and then east along the ND/SD border to north of Aberdeen. We completed more than half of them from IA north along the SD/MN border last summer and fall. Hip surgery in October curtailed further geocaching. That was okay as more caches were added to that trail of over 700. Our goal was to get them ALL before the end of June. We made a couple of little day trips getting more than 100 one day and about 70 on another. But we knew if we were EVER going to complete it, we would have to go for several days, staying in hotels. The cool part of this series of caches called the BLT (Border Line Trail) was that most of the caches were Unknown or Puzzle caches. In this case, the coordinates were not where they were expected to be. Sometimes we would be driving east for a mile or two and then head north for some miles and then west for some miles. I know we put nearly 1000 miles on the van the past two months completing the 450 caches that remained in the BLT. As of last Sunday, we can check that goal off the list!

This post is some of what we were treated to while geocaching from Aberdeen to the MN border.

statue at a cemetery in Aberdeen

finding a cache on an old school bell in a small town

a small chapel at another country cemetery

a children's slide attached to a tree trunk

there were steps cut into the trunk on the other side

a replica (dog house?) of the original farm house

the farm house today

soybean field

many, many ponds in northeast SD

mallards

but we also saw geese, sand hill cranes, pelicans

shetlands still wearing their winter coats

caching in North Dakota

abandoned farms

winding country roads

there should be a great pheasant hunting this fall

my friend passed away just before Thanksgiving 2014

she was diagnosed with cancer in August and gone in November

coming upon her grave was a bonus to the day

my dad told me about the granite border markers

I was tickled pink to see them in fields along the ND/SD border

turtles were migrating across the country roads

we also saw deer, wild turkeys, and lots of rodents

wild roses growing along the sides of the gravel roads

and in the ditches

as the flowers 'age' their color becomes less vibrant

the community of White Rock

it once had 7 grain elevators, 3 hotels, 4 saloons,

2 banks, a large department store, 2 lumber yards, 2 drug stores,

2 churches, and a K-12 school

population: THEN 600; TODAY 4

at the corner of the ND/SD/MN border

(actually MN is across the river)

I was thrilled the cache was at one of the granite markers

White Rock was in SD

once we crossed the bridge, we were in MN

To complete that part of the BLT and get some other area caches that included some first to find caches, took 4 days, Sunday through Wednesday. We did a previous 1 day trip collecting some caches between Watertown and Aberdeen. We went back north on Friday and again on Sunday. We don't have EVERY cache in the northeast part of the state, but we do have most of them.

We saw wildlife we don't normally see. We drove through small towns we had never been to before. We saw new, large homes on farms and abandoned farmsteads. One day we traveled the same roads 6 times to get to one cache. Because of all the lakes in the northern part of the state, the trip was 9-12 miles...six times. We finally got it! We saw flat farmland of black, fertile soil in the James River valley and then the grassland on the rolling Coteau hills, ranching country. We geocached in the fourth or maybe fifth largest community in SD and in ghost towns like White Rock. This road trip certainly had variety.