Second trip to Watertown

Matt doing his strongman act

This weekend I had another chance to go geocaching near Watertown in South Dakota. Since my appendectomy canceled my last trip I had planned there I was really excited that I was able to find some friends that wanted to go. Not just because I wanted some help in this endeavour, but because it would be fun to road trip with them.  When Matt and Zoa agreed to go I took what I had learned from the last trip down and started to come up with a plan. Bringing along stuff for lunch worked well last time and even a bit better this time.  With three of us in the truck, Zoa was able to make sandwiches as Matt and I kept caching. The map I made last time worked well, so I mapped out a route with around 230 caches for this trip.  I thought it would be a bit more then we had time for, but if things went well we would be able to do it.

We started caching around 8:15 in the morning and quickly found our groove.  Again having 3 cachers was a big advantage. One person could drive and depending on the side of the road that a cache was on one person could hop out and make the find. Most of the caches were quick finds and tended to be very repetitive, but there were a few along the way that challenged us.  At first evergreen trees slowed us down, but by the end of the day Matt was running right up to them and making the find.

Some hot grasshopper on grasshopper action

A few of the recently placed caches had us stumped. They had been found recently, but we couldn't make the find. Overall we finished the day finding 215 with only 8 DNFs I was very satisfied with our results.  I would like to move up to the #2 spot in North Dakota for number of finds and this trip brought us to around 150 caches left to hit that goal. It was an exhausting trip, but spending time with Matt and Zoa made it a lot of fun.