Geocaching All Over Idaho

Over Thanksgiving I went with bunkerdave on a 5 day geocaching trip across Idaho making some great progress on the Cache Across Idaho challenge cache (GC1HXKC). Basically trying to find at least one geocache in each of the 44 Idaho Counties. We didn't get them all of course but we got A LOT! Here's all the counties we hit in blue and next is the 1800 mile route we took.

It started with a drive to Meridian to his parents house. Usually this drive takes 5 hours...it took us ten and included a really funny story of me stepping in a giant pile of poo and getting it all over the car and then while attempting to clean it up having to explain to a cop what we were doing cleaning up poo in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere. Geocaching...duh!

We then cached around the Meridian/Boise area taking a break for a great Thanksgiving dinner with his family. We'd go out for caches and then keep going and going and end up getting back to the house sometimes as late as 4am. Then we'd have to sleep in so long the next day we'd barely have any daylight the next day and would end up night caching in the dark again. It was a vicious cycle. Some of these day trips took us as far as Ontario Oregon where we found a geocache on the grounds of the hospital where Dave was born...

(This is at the hospital cache in Oregon. I like the close up because it looks like he's signing some kind of magic glowing scroll or something....nope just Tupperware.)

...and all the way up to Riggins Idaho near the 45th parallel. As soon as we drove into Riggins I said, "This looks like the kind of town with good chicken friend steak, let's find somewhere to eat!" We picked the one diner out of 3 in the town with people in it(all with burly beards) and boy was my prediction correct...delicious...and covered in gravy. Best chicken fried steak ever. Dave kept ordering it other places thinking it'd be the same but he was always disappointed.

Most the trip we went on 2 lane highways which allowed us to stop at almost every Idaho history or geological sign we saw, even the ones without caches. We ended up reading a lot about volcanoes and Lewis and Clark. We passed through some cool little towns, saw some neat views, and became proficient in climbing barbed wire fences. (I however stumbled into a pile of barbed wire not being used for anything and ripped a number of holes in one pair of pants. These are now my designated geocaching pants) We even had a nice dinner in Sun Valley, and an excellent prebreakfast jeeping/hiking adventure over the hills above Salmon Idaho... where I forgot to bring my camera. But I took a couple pictures afterwards. I was so hungry after the hike but there was a cache by the river and Dave said no food till we found it. This is the river, and were I finally got my food. An open faced roast beef sandwich with more delicious gravy. I can't believe how much gravy I ate on that trip!

We ended the trip with a cache in an old V8 engine out in Teton County before driving strait home. Well, almost strait home, we stopped and took a picture by the Cache Bridge sign just for fun...and found one more really old cache by the Teton Dam...then we went home.

Here's a couple more memorable caches along the way- This was a weird cache we found called Jailhouse Blues. It's a urinal from a prison. If you look it's a toilet with a sink on top combo. It was out in the middle of a field and a funny surprise. Geocaches like this are always fun to find and unexpected.

This was my favorite cache of the trip. We parked at the top and went over the ridge to see this bridge. It's an old sheep bridge and so rickety and scary looking. I was very hesitant about crossing it. It looked like every crazy stereotype bridge from old western movies and cartoons. Dave however just walked down and went over it without thinking. I figured if it could hold him, it could hold anything. Really cool... but still scary.