US Trip 2016 – Summary

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The main vacation this year was a 24 days long road trip, spanning 22 US states.

A more detailed report for each part of the trip can be found in separate blog posts, which you can find in the list at the bottom of this article.

This year we started our trip in Nashville. And as before, we started driving right away to get some finds in as many states as possible. We spent the first night in Franklin, Kentucky. After spending the next day in Nashville, we continued to gather some states. We also did a detour through Smoky Mountain National Park, and parts of Blue Ridge Parkway.

We continued south, to Atlanta, where we did a tour of World of Coca-Cola. After a stop in New Orleans, we started heading north towards Texarkana, and eventually towards Denver. But we had to do a detour through Cawker, to visit the largest ball of twine (since we visited the one in Darwin, Minnesota last year).

We arrived in Denver in time to attend some of the events leading up to GeoWoodstock 14er. We met up with Imit42 and Nja42 (aka Team 42), two Norwegians we often meet at events at home.

After attending the events, and of course GeoWoodstock itself, we headed north towards Cheyenne, where we celebrated 4th of July at the Cheyenne Frontier Days.

The rest of the route took us to all the counties we were missing in Utah, and a lot of Visit Utah GeoTour caches. We’re a bit proud that we’re the only Norwegians that have found a cache in all counties in Utah!

After visiting 4 of the Mighty Five, we continued towards the Four Corners Monument, and Monument Valley. From there we continued towards northern Arizona, and did a tour through the Lower Antelope Canyon. We did a short detour through Grand Canyon, before attending a really nice event i Williams.

We continued along parts of Route 66, before eventually ending up on our way to Joshua Tree National Park. From there we continued towards the E.T. highway, where we did as many caches as we could during a day (daylight hours only). Just so we can say we’ve been there.

By the time we made it to Las Vegas, and was ready to return the rental, we had put 7 343 miles (11 817km) on it (it only had 289 when we picked it up in Nashville).

Tracklog

Summary (glitches and areas with bad GPS reception cause some errors here, like the max speed)
Summary (glitches and areas with bad GPS reception cause some errors here, like the max speed)
Elevation plot of the entire trip
Elevation plot of the entire trip

Caches visited

We found a total of 1 141 caches (49 DNF) in 151 counties in 21 US states. That is 431 caches more than we had planned to find! 119 of them were virtuals, 31 of them earthcaches, and 7 of them webcam caches.

We’ve attended the GeoWoodstock 14er mega event and a few other events along the road. We’ve met a lot of nice people, and maybe we’ll meet some of them again some other place in the world?

We’ve taken a whole lot of photos, will upload a lot of them together with the logs.

We’ve had mostly good weather, at least the time we spent outside the car. On the first part of the trip (before Denver), we had some really bad storms which made it quite hard to drive. But we really can’t complain about the weather!

The states we visited:

  • Tennessee
  • Kentucky
  • Virginia
  • West Virginia
  • North Carolina
  • South Carolina
  • Georgia
  • Alabama
  • Florida
  • Mississippi
  • Louisiana
  • Arkansas
  • Texas
  • Oklahoma
  • Kansas
  • Colorado
  • Wyoming
  • Utah
  • New Mexico (no cache finds, just Four Corners Natl. Monument)
  • Arizona
  • California
  • Nevada

National parks and monuments we visited:

  • Great Smoky Mountain National Park
  • Blue Ridge Parkway
  • Dinosaur National Monument
  • Bryce Canyon National Park
  • Capitol Reef National Park
  • Arches National Park
  • Canyonlands National Park
  • Four Corners Monument
  • Monument Valley
  • Lower Antelope Canyon
  • Grand Canyon National Park
  • Joshua Tree National Park

Visiting Mesa Arch in Canyonlands early enough to see the sunrise was a highlight. Definitely worth getting up at 4am to do that!

Sunrise at Mesa Arch

We’ve had an amazing and awesome trip, and we brought home a lot of great memories!

Read more detailed about our trip here:

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