31/07/2009 By Kabutroid
Awesome! This is not only officially my first cache ever found in the USA, it's my first cache found outside of Manitoba 
. So glad I decided to get a pocket query for 'cache along a route' for our weekend vacation trip to Minneapolis (wooh, Mall Of America ). So, it took 477 miles (768 km's) from home to log the geocache (yay for signing up for this hotel's "member" service... which itself was free... to get free wifi), but at least now I don't have to wait until Monday when I return to Canada (where it was supposed to rain all weekend... and we were going somewhere where it's supposed to be sunny and warm 
).
So yes... many hours of driving from home (thus also obviously making this the furthest cache I've ever found from home up to this point), and I kept on seeing on the GPS that there was always caches on the LEFT side of the road... never on the right. However... a few missed opportunities for rest stops later (damn you semis for being in the way when the exit to the rest stop comes up), I eventually got into this particular rest stop, for the sole purpose of finding my first American geocache.
Hopping out of the car, my wife opted to remain there to half-nap, since the sun was beating down on her for the past few hours making her tired. Off I go, but since the GPS seemed to have some accuracy issues at the moment, I ended up circling up on top of the big hill in the middle of that rest stop, and eventually circled around until I was nearing the coordinates. Although, for the purposes of being able to tell more accurately how fast we were going (our car shows kilometers, and only has the miles in increments of 20), the GPS was set to Statute instead of Metric. This... threw me off. What the hell is 150 feet? I dunno... that messes with my head. I know there's somewhere in the ballpark of 3 feet in a meter, but when you start getting to a large number of feet, I'm sure that starts getting more and more inaccurate 
. What didn't help either was that the electronic compass (which I despise in the Garmin 60CSx... glad that's only borrowed, and my normal 60Cx doesn't have that) kept pointing in some other direction than I was actually going. Stupid thing.
But... enough circling around, and lo and behold, I eventually find my way to the cache container . Of course, I ended up having to trudge through what seemed like a hundred thorny branches. I don't know what kinda trees you guys have around here... but they're angry, and seem to hate Canadians .
After I located the cache (which was somewhat rusted, but still easily openable), I poked around at the contents, but didn't immediately see anything I was up for trading for. However, I did add in my signature chainmail ball, and signed the logbook.
Thanks for placing the cache at this rest stop. It was fun, albeit somewhat scratchy, to get for my first cache outside of Canada .
Took: Nothing
Left: Logbook entry and chainmail ball
I-94 East Bound Rest Area (Big Spunk Lake)
| Difficulty: 
| Terrain: 
10 years of geocaching
