2023 will not go down as my best year for geocaching. I held out writing this until today in the hopes that I would be able to get out again this weekend, but the weather and my body did not cooperate. I finished the year with 908 finds for the year, and a grand total of 10,035 finds since I first began geocaching in 2010.

Finding my 10,000th geocache in Bermuda in November was the highlight of the year. I had hoped to find it much earlier in the year, but life didn’t cooperate. I started out strong last winter, working on the towns of New England. I actually added 231 towns to my total this year. I’ve found geocaches in 1100 of the 1498 towns in New England.  Just as summer began, I finished all of the towns of Vermont. It was great to finish that. I set my sights on Maine next…

But I suffered from burnout. Geocaching had started to seem like work. I didn’t want to go anywhere. I just needed to step back for a while. I didn’t do much geocaching over the summer at all. I attended an event on an island in Maine that a friend was hosting and found a few caches there, but my heart just wasn’t in it. I didn’t really start geocaching again until I decided that I wanted to log number 10,000 in Bermuda. Luckily, by then, I only needed 100 more caches to get to that number. There were enough new caches not terribly far from me that I could get there.

In June we were taking an Alaskan cruise out of Seattle, so of course I had to visit Geocaching headquarters. It was great to meet one of the “lackeys” and see all that there was to see there. We found a number of geocaches in Seattle before we left, then I found one at every port we stopped in. I added Washington and Alaska to my state tally as well as a Canadian Province.

The best geocaching milestone this year happened on our spring camping trip. I geocached here and there when we went sight-seeing (including Graceland). However, I’d been a regular reader of the blog Geocaching While Black by Marcellus Cadd. We were headed to where my son was stationed in Texas which was not far from his home base in Austin. We arranged to meet up for lunch and he took me around to some of the great geocaches around Austin. He also introduced me to another cacher, Razorbackgirl, at the library, where we sat outside on a balcony. Unfortunately, pne of the plants out there triggered my allergies and I couldn’t stop sneezing. But it was great to meet a couple of fervent geocachers outside of New England.

2024 Goals

I would like to finish one of the other states, likely Maine or Massachusetts. Both of them have islands that must be visited. Since I already visited Martha’s Vineyard, that only leaves Nantucket in Massachusetts. Maine, on the other hand, has seven islands included in the count that I need to take a ferry to. It’s likely I can finish the towns in Maine easier than Massachusetts, except for the islands, so we’ll see what happens with that. I’m not driving myself too hard. I learned that lesson last year.

Would I like to log at least 1,000 finds for the year? Absolutely! However, I don’t want to burn myself out, either. We’ll see how it goes.