February 14 - Phoenix - Day 3

We had a great day today, being ahead of schedule helped a lot. We started off the day by finishing our WhereIGo puzzle series that we had not finished last night. It got me started on my step counts since these included a bit of walking as there was no place to park, so I went for them while Jacques went to park further.

The scenery in the mountains of Maryland and West Virginia is very nice so halfway we stopped for a few caches which included a bit of uphill and steps, but the sun was out and best of all no snow. We even saw quite a few fields that were bright green.  Didn’t see any buds on the trees though.

Mountain Pass

Before stopping for the night in Morgantown we stopped again for another series, this time they were challenge caches (for the noncachers you have to have done certain types or a number of different caches like finding some in 5 different countries, over 100 caches in a day etc.). While looking for the road for these caches we ended up in a rutted dirt road, so we stopped to check out the road first. A government jeep was behind us. The woman driver offered to go check out if it was driveable for us. She came back and said that there was a bad spot.

She said to follow her, and she drove us about 10 miles to another road so that we could access our caches. After warning us that we were in bear territory she went her way. It was a nice quiet road with no cars, the sun was shining and +8 degrees so a very enjoyable hour.

There is a lot less traffic after you leave the route that everyone follows to go to Florida. I drove for a while and the traffic was easy but there is a lot of up and down mountains.

Tomorrow should be another easy day with about the same distance to travel, around 500 km. so we should be able to stop along the way again. There is a walking trail in Kentucky that we want to do.