After spending a day on the Extraterrestrial Highway, it was time to  head back towards Las Vegas, and the airport. Sadly this fantastic holiday was coming to an end. But we were determined to make the best of every second we had left!

After checking out, we started by finding the two caches at the parking lot next to the hotel – one traditional and an earthcache. After two more caches in Tonopah, we headed down towards Goldfield.

We got delayed by some road work, but we had more than enough time…

At the second stop in Goldfield, we hit a major milestone for the second time on this trip. The virtual cache in Goldfield was our find number 13 000!

We decided to spend some time in Goldfield, checking out the various shops and finding as many of the caches as we could.

At the next cache, a police car stopped right next to us while we were out looking for the cache. I was expecting a question about what we were doing, so what followed surprised us a bit 😛 «You guys geocaching?» «I haven’t found that one yet!»

He had spotted us at the first cache we found, and understood what we were doing when we stopped here as well. Sorry we didn’t have time to find you cache, next time!

We enjoyed driving around Goldfield, and ended up finding 14 caches in total there – 8 more than we had planned.

There was a lot of strange things to look at in Goldfield, and one of them was the «junk car forest». We’ve visited Carhenge and Cadillac Ranch before, so we just had to visit this place!

After the visit to Goldfield, we headed towards another ghost town – Rhyolite.

But first we had to stop at a couple caches along the way, including a cache at this old plane outside Beatty.

After another stop in Beatty, it was time to finally revisit Rhyolite. We visited Rhyolite last year as well, and somehow we didn’t have all caches in our GPSr then. So I managed to sit right next to/almost on a cache – without finding it!

That cache was the only reason for returning to Rhyolite this year. And after a visit to the museum (which was closed when we visited last year), we finally found it 😀

4G is not exactly something we see a lot of around here, not even 3G. So when we stopped at a rest area in Armagosa Valley, and finally got connection to the rest of the world again, we had to spend a couple minutes there.

As a bonus, we discovered that the rest area had a cache: GC61CX6 Rock camp fire. And it had no found it logs on my GPSr! And after checking online, we found no found it logs there either!

The cache was gone, and the CO asked if anyone wanted to replace it. So I contacted the CO (through Heltinnen’s account, on her phone), and shortly after we had made a replacement cache – and claimed the FTF (and first to maintain) 😀 Awesome!

We decided to get something to eat across the street, so we ended up spending some time here.

After eating, we found one more cache right outside Armagosa Valley (a funny one!). And then we headed straight to Las Vegas. Well, almost.

We did a detour to find another cache, but when we discovered how far it was from the road, we decided to just skip it. But the view was amazing!

We stopped at another cache, and a couple shops, before heading to the hotel.

We had planned a trip to find a couple virtuals, but decided that we needed the time to pack our stuff instead – after living in the car for more than three weeks, we probably needed the time we had… We visited Las Vegas last year anyway 😉

And we were right – we did need the time. Amazing how much stuff we had bought and collected during those three weeks! But we (mostly Heltinnen) managed to get everything into our three suitcases.

After a good night’s sleep, it was sadly time to head to the airport.

We stopped at the virtual cache overlooking the airport, and another traditional along the way. Then it was time to park the rental, after putting 7632 miles on it. Luckily we ended the trip with the same car as we started with this year, no mishaps like last year.

We made sure we had plenty of time, and arrived at the airport long before the first flight. So we could sit down and enjoy some food while waiting.

The first leg of the journey home was from Las Vegas to Toronto, with Air Canada. And the second from Toronto to Copenhagen, exactly opposite from when we came here.

From Copenhagen, we took a direct flight to Haugesund. And after many hours in the air, and many hours on airports, we were back home in Norway.

A fantastic holiday, was now over. Guess we should start planning the next!

See the summary of the trip here