AAR: Heart of the Civil War Heritage Area GeoTrail

Tom and I decided to take the few good weather days this past weekend and head across Maryland to work on the Heart of the Civil War Heritage Area GeoTrail. The GeoTrail consists of 16 caches, and everyone who finds and records thirteen of the code words found in each cache will receive a free prize, a geocoin is also available for purchase. We were able to find thirteen the first day, so first thing this morning we went to the Frederick Visitor Center to pick up our free prize (a Pathtag) and purchase the geocoin.

Overall, I felt like the GeoTrail was well done. There were a nice variety of cache types (one multiple, five mysteries and ten traditionals), and aside from a few wet logbooks and one illegible code word (which I was fortunate enough to figure out from the cache description), they were pretty well maintained. The coordinates for the multiple and mystery caches were easy to solve - I was even able to figure them out before we left on the trip, partly thanks to a website I found called the Historical Marker Database.
We were taken to historical places that I had only heard of, and learned many things along the way. Tom grew up in the general area, and had been to many of the locations over the course of his lifetime, but had never known the historical significance of those places. As an added treat, we got to walk along the Appalachian Trail for a couple of the caches - we've talked about the possibility of hiking a portion of it for many years, and now that we've had a taste of it, we might do more than talk about it. We also made pit stops at the Washington Monument and Chesapeake and Ohio Canal.
We ended the trip with one cache left to find on the GeoTrail, so we're planning on returning to the area and visiting Sharpsburg this weekend. I was looking forward to this stop the most this past weekend, but we ran out of time while visiting Harper's Ferry National Historical Park. After finding the last cache on the GeoTrail, we plan to tour Antietam National Battlefield where there is a Wherigo and a ten stage Lab cache.