I just returned from a nearly 4 month trip from NV, up thru Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, Washington, Oregon and back to Nevada.
I geocached in every state of course, and picked up probably 40 new counties. (Since I’ve cached in each of those states before, I’m working towards getting all of the counties in them.)
A highlight of the trip was when I got to stop at GC12 and GC17, both are in Oregon and close enough together that a short 8.5 mile walk got them both!
Ugh. Short? 8.5 miles with 1,600′ of it uphill. Ugh.
But I’m thrilled to have made it to both caches.
This summer I picked up 900 geocaches, which included 22 EarthCaches, 60 Unknown caches, 16 Virtual caches, and 8 Multis.
I did the Oregon State Star and the Washington State Star!
I was FTF on 32 geocaches in 4 states! LOL
Tons of fun. My wife and I got to see our first GrandBaby who was born in April, and then I got to see my father who turned 80 in June. Happy Birthday to both of them!
Of course traveling during a Pandemic was a little scary. Our first plan was to visit my folks but when the shutdowns started and all of our reservations along the way were cancelled we didn’t know what we were going to do. Finally in June we took off but at the time Utah was doing checkpoints at all the borders so we decided to just stay in Nevada for a while before we finally decided it was ok to head East to see the kids and their new baby.
I was never worried geocaching. I did safe things like carry hand sanitizer and wash my hands after each cache, mostly. I tried to be smart… I found dozens of caches that I was FTF in 2020 and those didn’t bother me. Anything in or near a city often meant they were found more frequently and those I was super cautious!
Other than that the biggest impact of Covid was people! Believe it or not I feel like there were more people out camping, hiking, visiting parks and geocaching, than ever before. Again face masks and distance were the words of the day, but not everyone followed that guidance.
One trailer parts store in Montana, I stopped to pick something up and wore a mask of course. The guy working there waved and said I didn’t have to wear ‘that damn thing in here’. LOL, I left it on. 🙂