I’ve been geocaching for almost 11 years now, ad the oldest geocache in the world is located in Colby, Kansas. There aren’t many geocaches left from those early years of the hobby. I decided to plan a road trip out there. I like driving and there were some places I made it a point to visit along the way.

Leaving on a Friday, I had a couple of obligations that morning that delayed my departure. One of them is a monthly breakfast I host for geocachers in my area (or who happen to be in the area). There were 10 of us at breakfast that morning, only the second time I’ve had it since the pandemic started. We had one over the summer that met with little enthusiasm so I waited until most of us had the ability to be vaccinated to have another one.

From here I started my drive. I wasn’t intending to get too far that first day. Google Maps said that Utica, NY was about a 5-hour drive. For me, it would be a little longer since I wanted to stop for some caches along the way.

There’s a Difficulty 5/Terrain 5 cache I’ve been working on called NH DeLorme Challenge – Leave No Page Unturned. I’ve found all of the geocaches on every page of the DeLorme Atlas already, and now this one I need to find one in all of the inserts for the towns as well. As of this trip, there were only 3 inserts I was missing, and Marlborough, NH was one of them. It was on my way out of the state as I took Route 9 across Vermont to Albany.

The first picture above is a cache I found at a stop off the road. Can you see it hidden there between the rocks? That should have been good, but I always plan a second one, just in case. That one was located by The Maynard-Gates House just down the road. Marlborough, NH was now accounted for!

I didn’t plan on much within a reasonable driving distance of my home; just the ones I needed in Marlborough and a few to get out and stretch my legs through Vermont.

My real prize today was seeing the Erie Canal for the first time. That’s right, 39 years of living in New York (on Long Island) and I’d never seen the Erie Canal before today. The pictures above are from Lock 7 Park in Niskayuna, NY. It was a pretty stop along the Mohawk River on a beautiful day.

I moved west along the New York State Thruway and came across a great rest area that was right on the Canal. I even got to watch a very long freight train ride along the canal and think about how that freight would have been transported on the Canal, once upon a time.

My next stop was Utica for the night. I had a small cooler with me with several Just Crack an Egg containers, eggs, lunch meat, bread, and butter so I made a sandwich when I stopped for the night. My big expenses this trip were the hotels and gas.