Planning a road trip, the Tentmantent way!
I love a good geocaching road trip, whether it be by accident or on purpose. All journeys present the chance for a spot of caching, but there’s something about a decent road trip that gets my juices flowing. Most years I plan one on my own, a selfish episode of self-care and well-being in the outdoors. I pick an area which I’ve not explored much, or maybe plan a route, and search there for geocaching opportunities. Sometimes I just look at a number of interesting caches and see what route they make. Other times I pick an area and see what’s around there.
Planning the trip is as much a part of the fun for me as the actual trip itself. I take great pride in organising the route, the overnight stops, the range of caches, the distances involved. I plan the whole thing out on a spreadsheet, with columns for the name, GC code, type, distance and also the reason for including a particular cache.
So what do I look for? How do I choose which caches to include? Everyone’s different, and people have their own caching preferences, but I like a bit of everything! Here’s a few examples of what I look for and what gets added to my spreadsheet.
Counties
I’ve completed all the English and Welsh counties now. That is to say, I’ve found at least one cache in each of them. This means that not only does my map of the UK now look an attractive shade of green, but I also qualify for number of challenge caches too. I still have several Scottish counties to complete, and maybe that’s where I need to head next. Some of my best road trips have started with looking for gaps on my county map!
Favourite Points
Since the introduction of the FP system in 2013, we have had a rough guide to cache quality to help guide our planning. It’s not always accurate, however. A fabulous series might have FPs spread all along the route rather than on one particular cache, and so might not show up in searches. People award FPs for all sorts of reasons, some more helpful than others- location, landscape, inventiveness, because of the company that day, the weather, because of a particular milestone, or any number of other reasons. However, a cache with over 50 FPs must have something going for it, and so attracts my attention when planning a trip!
Virtuals
There was a time when these were particularly rare. Whole road trips would be built around these caches. They often existed and survived for a particular reason; because of an interesting or unique location, for example. Their number diminished each year, once it was no longer possible to place them. Even after they were reintroduced as Virtual Rewards, they retained a degree of quality and rarity, and so have always featured in my road trip plans.
Webcam Caches
As with virtuals, Webcam caches piqued my interest because of their extreme rareness. Unlike virtuals, however, they are unlikely ever to be reintroduced partly owing to privacy restrictions and the obsolete nature of the whole concept. This makes them all the more rare. However, I’ve now logged all the remaining webcams in the UK, so they’ll only ever feature in overseas trips from now on. Shame, because I do love a webcam!
The Fizzy and Jasmer Challenges
Filling empty slots on the grids of these famous challenges is always something I look to do when compiling my list of caches to include on a road trip. The tools available on projectgc.com are extremely helpful with this, as they allow to search on a map for missing caches in your quest. Again, spotting the location of a particular cache which helps to fulfil an aspect of one of these challenges, can in itself decide the route of a road trip. Another reason for me to head to Scotland and complete my only missing Jasmer month!
Events
Once I have the broad location or route for my trip, I start to look for any events that might be happening in that area, and tweak the route accordingly. Sometimes I might end my day’s travels in a certain town to tie in with an evening gathering. If there are none happening at that time, I might plan one of my own. There’s nothing I like better than making new friends in a new area, or seeing old friends make to effort to join me. These roadtrip events have somehow become a series: Tentmantent on Tour, and include events as far afield as London, Blackpool, Hong Kong, Victoria Falls and Baoding! Some of my oldest and best friends in caching are those who just turned up to a pub gathering on one of my trips!
Challenges
Some road trips have been planned around the completion of a particular challenge cache, or at least sought the opportunity to make progress towards one. If not, I will often look at my draft route to see if there are challenge caches in the area which I qualify for. I once detoured from my route purely in order to qualify for a cache which I was due to pass a day or so later! I also set myself personal challenges such as finding the 100 oldest surviving UK caches.
The Spreadsheet
By now, my plans might amount to a rough idea of where in the country I might be heading, a list of possible caches to find and the names of a few possible camp sites or hostels along the way. Next I would map the caches, having made a list of them, or a GSAK database, and looked for a likely route. There are tools to help pick the best route along a list of waypoints, which can be a good start. The route is then tweaked in order to cross a county boundary, for example, or visit a particular landmark. Overnight stops and possible event locations are then added, and the likely daily mileage is totted up to ensure each segment is achievable. The process of refinement continues right up until the day of departure, and sometimes during the trip itself. The final task is to add all these caches to a list, download them onto my GPSr, print off the spreadsheet and clip them to good old-fashioned clipboard!
Much as I Iove caching, camping and the journey itself, I’ve always enjoyed the planning of trips almost as much as the adventure. The game’s afoot!
A F Wright
5/1/2022
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