My First International Geocaches

My travels recently took me to Alberta, Canada. I stayed in a city called Grande Prairie. This part of the country looks a lot like The Midwest of the US. It was very flat and all that was missing were the water towers announcing the town's name.

I had a bit of trouble with customs while I was trying to enter the country. They actually sent me into the immigration office to have me better explain my reasons for visiting Canada. The immigration officer was looking me up in whatever database and asked if I had ever been fingerprinted. I replied that I had. He ask why and I told him I had been in the Marine Corps. I guess that's why they were worried. It would only take one motivated Marine to take over the entire country of Canada.

As usual, I didn't have a lot of free time to go geocaching but I did manage to squeeze a few in. I found several within a mile or so from my hotel so I went for a walk one afternoon. My GPS was a bit jumpy and I did a lot of walking in circles.

I found myself in a little forest looking for a small geocache. The trouble with my GPS turned out to be too much for me and I had to DNF one. I then went for a travel bug hotel near "The World's Largest Sundial". It was hidden near the edge of a little pond. Again, I went the long and difficult way but eventually made the find. There were no travel bugs inside but I was able to drop off Flat Oprah that I had picked up in Massachusetts.

I've since found out that several places around the world claim to have the worlds largest sundial. Since I have friends in Canada, I'll trust that this is, in fact, THE largest.

A local cacher named Tons of Fun saw my find on one of his caches and offered to show me around some local geocaches. Unfortunately, I had spent all of my caching time. He had some geocoins that he wanted to travel back to the US so I did meet up with him. We talked caching for bit and we walked over to mystery cache he owned that the final was a couple hundred feet from my hotel. It was nice to meet him and wish I would have had more time to geocache.

On my last day in Canada, I noticed that someone had dropped a bunch of travel bugs in that TB hotel I had been to. I went back and grabbed my first yellow Jeep and a few geocoins.

Canada was good. It was a bit cold for this California boy. (Yes I know I'm from Illinois, but you loose your resistance to cold quickly, trust me.) It got below freezing and while it was fun to experience, it was nice to come home.

My First "Out Of State" Geocache Finds

As many of you know, My new position at work allows me to do a bit of traveling. I recently spent two weeks in Eastern Massachusetts. I was working at Smith College in a town called Northampthon. This was an old college town, (Old to me, my English Co-worker kept laughing at me for thinking the buildings were "old") I was certain that most of the places I saw had to be haunted.

I didn't have a ton of free time but I did manage to squeeze in a few geocaches. The first one was about a half mile from my hotel along a trail made along an old railway line. I decided to walk to it. I actually had to walk about a mile to get to the entrance to the trail and then about 3/4 mile to the cache itself. It was a fun walk. The trail was surrounded by trees and I felt miles from civilization. The cache was a cammo tupperware and it had a travel bug inside. I decided to take Flat Oprah back to California with me.

Flat Oprah was started in Maine by an elementary student in a geocaching program at school. The Travel Bug had spent it's entire life moving slowly around Massachusetts. Her total mileage before I picked her up was just over 200 miles. Thanks to me and American Airlines, Flat Oprah, now has 2859 miles. I'll be taking her with me on my next trip to Canada.

I found a couple of other caches while in Mass. One on the college campus and a few more about town. Now I can get one of those stat maps that shows the states I've found caches in. I know two states isn't much, but it's more than one state and there are more to come.

P.S. If you haven't read about it yet, head over to PJ's place. He is having a travel bug race. It should be fun. Join in!

I tried to upload more photos, but Blogger is not being friendly with me.