Five States in One Day

I was thinking I hadn't written here in awhile, but I was surprised to see it's been almost a month since my snake post. This continues my series of posts regarding my 2017 summer road trip.

When last on this series, I'd written about Mingo, the oldest active geocache in the world, located in eastern Kansas. The next day, we left heading to northeast New Mexico, but our route took us on a non-intuitive trek through five states, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. Had I been thinking a little bit more, I could have routed us through Nebraska and/or Wyoming and Utah. The purpose, obviously was to find at least one geocache in each state. And yes, there's challenges out there for finding caches in several states in a single day. 

I've signed one that challenges you to find caches in 7 states in a day. It's a lot easier on the east coast than on the west coast, but this one day took us through 5, so even in the west it's possible. Start at the edge of one state, travel through 5 others and end on the edge of the next state, which is about what we did at least to get 5 different states. The photo is of the two of us getting a virtual cache at the confluence of the borders of Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. Believe it or not, this was the second confluence of three states that we'd visited on this trip, having previously visited the confluence of South Dakota, Iowa, and Minnesota. Once the pandemic restrictions have totally lifted, I guess I'll need to eventually get back to the four corners area and get a photo of me there as well.

Things I learned on this day's travel. 

1. Eastern Colorado is much more part of the Great Plains than it is of the Rocky Mountains. 

2. Smart phones and time zones are remarkably accurate. There was one cache we found, where we were driving on the road into New Mexico. I parked the car at the side of the road, walked across the road to find a cache at the northwest corner of Texas. In the time I walked across the road, my smart phone had adjusted itself to Central Daylight Time (Texas) and once we walked back on the other side of the road, it had adjusted itself back to Mountain Daylight Time (New Mexico).