Quick Links:
This was our 3rd trip to the Allegany State Park Geobash.
It's always one of our favorite events - the night caches are awesome!
Each time we try to do the trip a bit differently. This time we focused on seeing more on the way there (Friday) and on the way home (Sunday), adding in some big sightseeing adventures. We only found around 50 geocaches in three days.. but we found GREAT caches. We definitely focused on quality over quantity for this trip.
This was the google maps My Map I plotted out to plan our trip
Friday
Google maps said the fastest route (by about 6 minutes) was to go out 80, then head north. That worked for me! It gave me an excuse to stop in Dubois at Dr Doolittle's Roadside Creamery, one of the stops on my Pa Road Trip maps. It was a FUN place!
More about Dr Doolittle's here:
And since we were in Dubois, I searched the caches in the area and then sorted by favorite points.
Super fun multi stage cache. - Would You Like Fries With That
om there it was another hour to our next stop - The Kinzua Bridge. That was a big "must see" on my PA roadtrip map, and it did not disappoint.
More about the Kinzua Bridge State Park here:
We did the earth cache, and a regular cache, at the park as well. They were both quick and simple. The nearby regular cache is an ammo can in the woods, and you can park just feet from it.
The group photo is not uploaded yet - here's a random one from the logs to hold the space.
Then it was another 30 minutes to Bradford PA, where I had hoped to tour the Zippo Case Museum, but we were just out of time. We did get there in plenty of time for the Stoned In A Flash - In PA - flash mob geoevent.
We also did a guardrail cache nearby... it was one of the more interesting guardrail caches we've done. :-)
From there we drove to Allegany State Park and checked in.. only to find that we had mistakenly chosen a site with no electricity! Back to the camp office, where they graciously and efficiently moved us to an "emergency" site, with electricity. Apparently this awesome park keeps an entire loop of "emergency" sites, for when the sites people book do not work out, for various reasons.
We got set up at our new site in plenty of time to head over to the evening Meet & Greet Campfire event. There's live music and food at the campfire, and we were given a free pathtag when we signed in. We found a few other caches in the park, then headed out for the night caches - our favorites! New night caches were posted each night of the event, and there were older ones we had not yet done.
Saturday
Molly horsing around at the Flash Mob Event
See more of Molly's adventures by searching #TheAdventuresOfMollyMouse on instagram
ADD GROUP PHOTO HERE ONCE IT IS SHARED
Saturday morning we got up bright and early (6am) and drove into town for the Stoned In A Flash morning event. Molly posed with a horse mask travel bug. (yes, there were two Stoned In A Flash events this week-end - both flash mobs. One in Pa, south of Allegany Park the day before the ASPGB event, one north of the park the morning of the ASPGB event)
Then over to Tim Hortons for breakfast - we love Tim Hortons, and do not have them near our home. There's not much cell coverage at the state park, so we took a few minutes at breakfast to catch up our night cache logs and plan our caches (download to offline) for the day.
Before we headed back to the park, we went to Rock City and did the Earth Cache there.
MORE ABOUT ROCK CITY (Link Once Written)
We misunderstood a group of cachers who left right before us, we though they said they had also completed the night cache while there. So we attempted it, but could not complete it. It was a great walk though! Later we found that no one has been able to complete that night cache for a long time. :-(
We went back to the park and did the lab caches - they were fun! We figured out all but one - I still have no idea how to solve the What A View lab cache. More about lab caches here:
ADD LINK TO LAB CACHE POST (I have to write said post first...)
There were vendors, the raffle, and games and then the group photo, and the announcement of next years mascot.
More about the Allegany State Park Geobash - http://fieldsofhether.blogspot.com/2017/05/allegany-state-park-geobash-2017.html
We headed back to our campsite to rest for a bit - then did the nearby earth caches before heading back to Bradford to do a few caches there.
ADD PHOTO OF DAN & MOLLY AT EARTH CACHE
The McKean Penn Grade Crude Oil earth cache surprisingly took us to a McDonald's parking lot. The oldest working oil well in Bradford is literally situated between the McDonalds building and the drive through. Unfortunately it was not pumping when we were there, I would have loved to have seen that.
(check for a better photo to use here)
This was a real favorite for us. At first I thought it was a super difficult hike.. but no, this was a different sort of challenge. It took a hot dog stick, a golf umbrella, a grabber tool, a dog leash,and two work gloves - but we retrieved and replaced the cache!
And then back to do more night caches at the park! We really, really enjoy night caches!
Sunday
Technically we could sleep in on Sunday morning, and we did sleep in until about 7:30. LOL! We headed back to Tim Horton's, before driving an hour to the Eternal Flame Falls geocache. The Eternal Flame Waterfall is another biggie on my "must see" list - we knocked off quite a few of those on this trip! This hike was sooooooo much easier than I expected from what I had read. If you are familiar with Rickets Glen, it's very similar to the falls trail - but much shorter.
More about our trip the Eternal Flame Waterfall:
Our plan was then to do a few caches in East Aurora, and visit Vidlers 5 & Dime. But our car had other plans... it left us sit at the McDonalds parking lot while we were at the What A View cache. I'm just thankful it left us sit THERE, in town, with cell service. We have been to a lot of night caches up in the mountains with no cell service for the past two days... We got the car dealt with (dead battery - but the battery and alternator tested fine... so we don't really know what the problem was. After doing some research, I suspect it's the air conditioner relay switch - that seems to be a common issue causing battery problems on the Honda CRVs. We bought a new, stronger, battery, just to be safe)
While waiting for the battery to be fixed, I searched Yelp and found two nearby "dueling" hot dog restaurants. Hot dogs are not something I normally think of as worth going out to eat, but I was intrigued. They two places are about a block apart, so we decided to go to both and compare.
Read more about Taffy's and Ted's Hot Dog stands here:
ADD PHOTO OF VIDLERS
Vidlers 5 & Dime was interesting, but sooooooo cramped and crowded. The outside of the store was probably my favorite part. This is a cute little town and would be a fun place to have lunch!
We did the Intercache here too, because it's the first intercache we've seen and we really wanted to try it. VERY nice. The software is just so much smoother than wherigo, and there are no cartridges to download.
More about the Intercache here:
Next we drove to Now That's Country - one of my favorite "gadget" caches of all time. This is so well done! Simple - but fun! (We've done the similar one by WVTim, but this one "works" a bit differently)
Then on to Letchworth State Park - the Grand Canyon of the East. The plan was originally to spend about two hours there, then drive home. But the car issues put us two hours behind, and by the time we got there we were cold, tired, and it was pouring down rain. We stopped at a few of the overlooks and realized we really wanted to see the park, but it was just raining too much to enjoy it. So we booked a nearby hotel room and extended our stay.
I'm glad we did - we easily spent half a day at Letchworth (after another stop at Tim Hortons...) and we STILL didn't see anywhere near everything we would have liked to have seen.
ADD LINK TO LETCHWORTH POST (I have to write said post first...)
On our way home we did make one more stop, for another awesomely creative geocache:
All in all, an amazing trip!!
We pick up Christmas ornaments as souvenirs on all or our travels, these are three we picked up from this trip.
======================================================================
Our Cache Stats for ASPGB Week-End
Found 46 Total caches
Events 4
Night Caches 7
Earth Caches 8
Virtual Caches 1
Intercache 1
Regular Caches 25
DNF 2
=================================
https://susquehannavalley.blogspot.com/p/geocaching.html
No comments:
Post a Comment
I'll read the comments and approve them to post as soon as I can! Thanks for stopping by!