Our October excursion to Maui really began back in 2007 when we designed and had produced a Geocaching coin to commemorate our fiftieth wedding anniversary. The cost and minimum number required increases with each additional attribute that is added to the basic coin. A few more to make it trackable a little more for gold, and quite a little more to give it an icon which will show up in the profile of each person who logs it as a find. We decided to go whole hog and so the bottom line is that we wound up with more than 200. What to do with them? People trade them, collect them, sell them, and place them in caches. When you start a coin on its journey, you can name it, tell its story, and give it a mission. We decided to find a cache in each of Michigan’s 83 counties and place a coin in it named for that county.
That was a fun quest but by the fall of 2008, we had accomplished it. Now what?
What the heck, why not one for every state? We cached on our way to Florida for Christmas with detours to the west of I 75 on the way south and to the east on the way home. We expanded our route on the way to DC and made side trips on our way to San Diego. We made longer trips to circle New England and to visit Yellowstone. We took a cruise to Alaska with the Sniders and visited the “Original Stash” in Oregon while we were at it.
The life of the coins varies, about 1 in 4 is pocketed by someone and is never heard from again. the distance they have traveled varies from 0 to over 6000 miles. It is fun to place them and it is also fun to track their travels.
With 49 states and the District taken care of, only Hawaii was left for us to visit and drop off a coin. We decided to combine our trip with a stop in San Diego to visit Tom, see his remodeled dwelling, and visit with Kevin, Amy, Maya and Ella, the newest addition to the family.
We got tickets to leave TC on the 17th.
The flight was on American Eagle, scheduled for 7:45 a.m. so we had the car packed the night before, got up at 4, were at the airport at 6, checked in and were alone when we went through security. (That never happened again.)
The flight was on time, we were in Chicago at 7:35 and there was a wheelchair waiting. The porter took us through the terminal with a chair in each hand from G20 to H15. We had time for a snack and were in the air by 9. We were on the ground in San Diego by 11 and gathered our bags. Tom picked us up in his Subi and it was off to lunch at Marie Callender’s just up the street from his house. He had to go back to work and we just crashed. For dinner we tried to find a Mexican place that Nancy liked but it was closed. We did Asian instead.
