The last two days my “caches found”-count has skyrocketed, relatively speaking. The reasons for that is that a friend of mine and I went for some caching trips following the highway in both directions.

On Saturday I got a message from hbjorg asking if I wanted to come to Hamar for a combined shopping and caching trip. I said yes and off we went, south on E6. We stopped at a couple of places along the way including the now abandoned Biri mall and horse track (where there was a giant flee market that day), Rudshøgda an Moelv. We tried a couple of others as well but one we couldn’t find and another was gone, so the grand total of the day came to 9 caches. Oneo fhtem was a Stargate cache- a type of cache I’ve never heard about before that lets trackable items “fast travel” to different parts of the world, and named after the scifi franchise I love. There were 10 trackables in it that had fast traveled there and needed a lift to other caches, so we grabbed one each and logged the rest as “discovered”. Had I known how many caches we were visiting the next day I’d have grabbed more.

Yesterday I was at work from 7:00 to 13:00, and as I was about to go home he sent me another message asking if I wanted to do another caching run, this time going north and with no shopping. I said yes of course and off we went. We started at Tretten where he lives and grabbed a couple of easy ones before continuing up Gudbrandsdalen. We stopped at two camping sites along the highway to find nearby caches, as well as a resting place that turned out to be a DNF. We hit pretty much any cache near the highway up to and including Kvam which is about 80 km north of where we started, which marked the end of both my pocket query and the topo map I had on the GPS. We saw some really interesting places, including Ringebu stave church, Gudbrandsdalsdomen, a really interesting waterside arena in the woods near Frya, an awesome viewpoint in Hundorp and a pedestrian suspension bridge in Kvam. We moved a travel bug and also dropped the on hbjorg had picked up the day before, but there was a surprising lack of trackables in the caches we came across. We ended up coming home at around 23:30 and I was up for a few more hours logging caches and uploading photos.

“Speedcaching” like that can be fun as long as it’s not the main way of caching- I still prefer walking to caches and not driving from one to the other. At the same time, there’s a limit to how far you can walk without traveling to a place with other means, and considering how many caches there are in the world you always want to find as many as possible when you’re somewhere new. It’s also nice to bump the caches found count a bit, and 32 caches in two days qualifies as that when I had 46 in 1.5 months prior to that. There are a lot of photos from the trip in the flickr set. I do wish I had a DSLR as the iPhone and my cheap-ass point and shoot don’t do some of these places justice.