Is it just me,

[+dibbg]

I'm sure it's not me, but, I get all excited about going on vacation or out of town just to be able to GC away from my home coordinates.

 

I'm going to visit my brother this weekend, and to Myrtle Beach next weekend, and all I can think about is running my PQ's and making sure my GPS is ready for some finds.

 

[+BlueDeuce]

My family tends to take many short notice trips (okay, maybe I'm just not paying attention) but the first thing out of my mouth is 'Oooh, Geocaching!'

 

[jnahansen]

I've got a trip to Arkansas and one to Montana this summer. I was thinking of the geocaching possibilities today. A little scared of the ones in Arkansas as I'm highly allergic to poison ivy. Still gonna risk it though.

[+MountainRacer]

I do that whenever I can. Often when traveling back and forth from home to school, I'll leave early and cache along the way because the middle ground is out of the normal range of either place. Of course, caching down the shore or in Florida is nice too.

[+Harry Dolphin]

The problem starts when you plan your vacation around geocaching, rather than the other way round... Like when we went to Maryland to get the Project A.P.E. cache.

[+Lovey Pigs]

we will look at the area to see if any possible, but have not let geocaching be the main part of a vacation...yet!

[+briansnat]

If the locals are into placing caches in interesting areas, geocaching on vacation can be a blast. It can bring you to places that the average tourist would never know about. I've discovered many fascinating places through geocaching that you don't find in the tourism brochures.

 

Unfortunately, too often these days I find myself on a tour of local strip malls and big box store parking lots, so I wind up geocaching less and less while on vacation

[+SgtSue]

The problem starts when you plan your vacation around geocaching, rather than the other way round... Like when we went to Maryland to get the Project A.P.E. cache.

 

I will admit to making several detours to find caches in boardering states during last years trip to Yellowstone. I will not admit to planning this year's vacation to visit New England because I've never cached in any of those states. OK well maybe I did, but I don't think I have a problem.

[+DonB]

I've got a trip to Arkansas and one to Montana this summer. I was thinking of the geocaching possibilities today. A little scared of the ones in Arkansas as I'm highly allergic to poison ivy. Still gonna risk it though.

You didn't say what part of Arkansas you would be in, but if you are going to be near Jonesboro we stopped in a park just south of there that had around a dozen caches in it. I think it was called Craighead park. Do a search for elbow tree and I think it will show one of the caches in the park.

[+clevek]

I'm from the Blackstone River Valley corridor which runs from Worcester, MA to Providence RI-each week I'm amazed at this area and what it has to offer geocaching out in the woods, in parks, and along bike trails. When I was introduced to geocaching several months ago out in Palm Springs, CA, I thought geocaches were small fake rocks and bricks but little did I know there are ammo cans chock full of goodies everywhere!

Take Care and Keep on Caching (TCAKOC)!

[+Wadcutter]

We hook up and go with our 5th wheel quite a bit. The freedom to go is one of the advantages of being retired. Sometimes it's a trip where we look for caches along the way and other times we plan our trips for specific caches. In 2003 we drove 1700 miles one way just to get this one and it was well worth the trip - "The Wild Bunch Cache (GC8385)". We're leaving again in a week on a 2500 mile trip. This trip we'll be looking for whatever caches are along the way and at our destination. Planning a trip in June about 1200 miles one way for specific caches.

[+Thrak]

The best part of a vacation is getting away with my wife. After almost 36 years of being married that might sound odd but........

 

Geocaching is an added vacation bonus and we always make sure to have pocket queries for caches along the way and in the area of our destination. We've seen some pretty cool places and things due to geocaching while on trips.

[+dibbg]

If the locals are into placing caches in interesting areas, geocaching on vacation can be a blast. It can bring you to places that the average tourist would never know about. I've discovered many fascinating places through geocaching that you don't find in the tourism brochures.

 

Unfortunately, too often these days I find myself on a tour of local strip malls and big box store parking lots, so I wind up geocaching less and less while on vacation

 

Looking at your post count I'm sure you are well aware, but what I do when I go on a trip is do a quick PQ and tell it to only find "regular and large" caches. For the most part they won't be in parking lots.

 

I can't wait for my trip tomorrow, already have a few GC's planned out!!

[+hukilaulau]

If the locals are into placing caches in interesting areas, geocaching on vacation can be a blast. It can bring you to places that the average tourist would never know about. I've discovered many fascinating places through geocaching that you don't find in the tourism brochures.

 

Unfortunately, too often these days I find myself on a tour of local strip malls and big box store parking lots, so I wind up geocaching less and less while on vacation

 

Looking at your post count I'm sure you are well aware, but what I do when I go on a trip is do a quick PQ and tell it to only find "regular and large" caches. For the most part they won't be in parking lots.

 

I can't wait for my trip tomorrow, already have a few GC's planned out!!

When I'm going to an unfamiliar area< I still do the same as when I started geocaching: Read the cache pages! Then put them in a bookmark list and PQ the list. Anyone who goes blind into a caching area and then is disappointed with what they get only have themselves to blame.

[+the hermit crabs]

If we want to go away somewhere but don't have a firm destination in mind, we will always check for nearby caches before making our decision.

 

Last fall we were trying to decide on where to go for a week, and we vaguely remembered having read something about a "mini Grand Canyon" in Pennsylvania. It sounded like a cool spot, so we looked it up online, found that it was in the Leonard Harrison and Colton Point state parks. We then came to gc.com to see what caches were in those parks. There were almost none!

 

We were kinda disappointed... but somewhere during our search we had stumbled upon a different spot, described as "the Grand Canyon of the east". So we looked that one up, and found that it was in Letchworth State Park in New York. That canyon looked like it would be as nice to visit as the PA one. We checked for caches -- the park was chock-full of them! We read the cache pages, and many of them sounded like terrific ones. So we made our vacation plans.

 

Pennsylvania's loss was New York's gain, as NY ended up being the recipient of our tourist dollars for the hotel stay, restaurants, park-entrance fees, etc.

 

If we can have a great destination, or a great destination plus a bunch of good caches, we'll take the one with the caches every time.

[+JABs]

We plan all our holidays around where we can cache and what new places it will take us.

Usally we spend the Two weeks pri to going reading cache pages checking and planing routes.

But I still run sevearl PQ of different areas so that we always have somethiing up our sleeve

for those larst minute trips that send you all over the place. Including work related.

[+bettsbugs]

The problem starts when you plan your vacation around geocaching, rather than the other way round... Like when we went to Maryland to get the Project A.P.E. cache.

 

How is this a problem?

[+NYPaddleCacher]

If the locals are into placing caches in interesting areas, geocaching on vacation can be a blast. It can bring you to places that the average tourist would never know about. I've discovered many fascinating places through geocaching that you don't find in the tourism brochures.

 

Unfortunately, too often these days I find myself on a tour of local strip malls and big box store parking lots, so I wind up geocaching less and less while on vacation

 

For the past 12 years or so we have have been taking vacations in the Outer Banks of North Carolina so we know the area pretty well. When we went for the first time after I started geocaching we went to several spots that we didn't know existed.

 

We're taking another vacation there in two weeks. Since we're driving down (a two day trip) I've got three cache-on-a-route PQs, and two other area PQs set up. I'll merge them all together using GSAk before we go.

 

There are a lot of nice caches in the Outer Banks, though it seems that many of them are hidden in the crotch of a tree and covered in pine needles.

 

I'm more interested in finding interesting caches that just building numbers but one of the stats that I like improving is the States/Countries in which I have found a cache. Since my work often involves a bit of travel I almost have as many Countires as States in which I have found a cache. On this trip I'll be able to add three Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia and later in the month will add Minnesota and possibly Michigan and Wisconsin. I'm looking at a conference that I would like to attend in Denmark in the Fall and am just starting on a new project which might likely take me to several countries in Africa.

[crawil]

...

 

Geocaching is an added vacation bonus and we always make sure to have pocket queries for caches along the way and in the area of our destination. We've seen some pretty cool places and things due to geocaching while on trips.

I don't know if I could have put it any better. That is exactly what we do. Last summer, I had a opportunity to attend Boy Scout leader training at Philmont Scout Ranch in NE New Mexico. When we looked at the map and saw how close it was to CO, KS, OK and TX, the whole family was excited to go so we could add those states to our list!

[+Team Cotati]

If the locals are into placing caches in interesting areas, geocaching on vacation can be a blast. It can bring you to places that the average tourist would never know about. I've discovered many fascinating places through geocaching that you don't find in the tourism brochures.

 

Unfortunately, too often these days I find myself on a tour of local strip malls and big box store parking lots, so I wind up geocaching less and less while on vacation

 

Looking at your post count I'm sure you are well aware, but what I do when I go on a trip is do a quick PQ and tell it to only find "regular and large" caches. For the most part they won't be in parking lots.

 

I can't wait for my trip tomorrow, already have a few GC's planned out!!

 

You are of course exactly correct. That's the whole point, you're traveling out fo your normal areas for caching and by definition, you won't have cleaned out everything except those PIA urban micros. And as you have mentioned, sorting on regular and large does in fact result in much better quality cache locations. This will be especially true if you craft your PQ's to avoid city centers and other heavily populated areas.

 

Caching while traveling is a really great way to explore new areas.

 

Cache on Garth!!

[+Harry Dolphin]

If the locals are into placing caches in interesting areas, geocaching on vacation can be a blast. It can bring you to places that the average tourist would never know about. I've discovered many fascinating places through geocaching that you don't find in the tourism brochures.

 

Unfortunately, too often these days I find myself on a tour of local strip malls and big box store parking lots, so I wind up geocaching less and less while on vacation

 

Brian, you're not planning your trips properly! We went to see my sister in Maine in 2006. We planned our trip for one cache in Coinnecticut, then spent the night in Greenwich, Rhode Island, visiting Goddard Memorial State Park. Off to Maine, we stopped at Odiorne State Park, New Hampshire. Had a great time in Maine. Okay, we did the Mass Pike West caches on the way home.

It all depends how you plan your trip.

[+BarbVA]

We like to hook up our travel trailer at least one weekend a month and a couple of full weeks per year. We make our travel plans without checking for caches first, generally because my priority is finding good kayaking. But after we are set, we run the zip code within about 15 miles and go for as many as we feel like. We found a couple of really nice places last weekend out camping that we would have never seen without geocaching as part of our trip, but did end up in a few parking lots as well. Since we are new to the sport/activity, there doesn't seem to be a problem for us finding plenty of undiscovered caches wherever we go.

[+gof1]

If the locals are into placing caches in interesting areas, geocaching on vacation can be a blast. It can bring you to places that the average tourist would never know about. I've discovered many fascinating places through geocaching that you don't find in the tourism brochures.

 

Unfortunately, too often these days I find myself on a tour of local strip malls and big box store parking lots, so I wind up geocaching less and less while on vacation

 

Start by eliminating micros from your PQ. You'll likely miss one or two decent caches, but that'll remove almost all the strip malls. But then you know that.

[Neos2]

I love to travel and now that we cache, we always cache our way to our destination and plan to find a few while we are there...

 

I disagree with the folks that say to filter out micros (but then again 2/3 of all the caches I've found were micros). I've found that micros in urban tourist areas tend to take you to exactly the kinds of places you would never discover on your own. I do recommend reading the cache pages ahead of time and deting any that sound too mundane. Why spend vacation time on something you could do at home? You can almost always tell from the cache page if the cache is something special or not.

 

(Seems to me a lot of the people who always recommend avoiding micros are usually the people most likely to just plug waypoints into their GPS and go to them without even opening the cache page first--They act surprised and indignant when they get to the cache and find out it's a lampost micro in the corner of a parking lot. Ten seconds on the cache page would fix that--you can skim far enough into a cache page to read the words "while your spouse is shopping" before the map even loads!).

 

One really nice surprise was a cache that we found a couple of hundred feet from our hotel in Myrtle Beach. I recommend it.

 

The ones at the state park are cool too, though it costs a little to get in there for the day. I loved the bridge on this one.

Edited March 29, 2008 by Neos2

[+dibbg]

Thanks for the MB tips Neos2, I'll go for those while I'm there next weekend! (and maybe a few more...)

 

[+NYPaddleCacher]

I love to travel and now that we cache, we always cache our way to our destination and plan to find a few while we are there...

 

I have a difficult time doing much caching while enroute. On my upcoming trip it'll be a 5-6 hour drive on each leg of the trip *without* stopping. Stopping for a few caches along the way won't add a significant amount of time but I can't see making more than 3-4 stops or the drive would just be too long (even with a portable DVD player our 4 year old gets kinda antsy).

 

I disagree with the folks that say to filter out micros (but then again 2/3 of all the caches I've found were micros). I've found that micros in urban tourist areas tend to take you to exactly the kinds of places you would never discover on your own. I do recommend reading the cache pages ahead of time and deting any that sound too mundane. Why spend vacation time on something you could do at home? You can almost always tell from the cache page if the cache is something special or not.

 

I just placed a cache that was published easter morning that I published as a micro. The actually container is certainly a micro but there is also an outer container that is more of a "small". The guidelines seem to recommend that the cache size be chosen based on what can be placed in it (just a log, room for swag, etc) I couldn't really post it as a small since it just doesn't have room for swag, so it's listed as a micro and those that categorically ignore micros would miss this one. Here what one of the first cachers to find it said in his log: "I have to say that this is about the coolest cache i have found so far. The name,the place,the day,the hide location, the outer cache container and the inner cache containers all work together. "

 

One really nice surprise was a cache that we found a couple of hundred feet from our hotel in Myrtle Beach. I recommend it.

 

I have on a couple of occasions chosen a hotel where I would be staying while on a business trip partially because of it's proximity to some caches. In both cases they were in places where I had a short layover, didn't have a car, and not much time for caching. As a results I've logged one and only one cache in the Netherlands and South Africa.