AAR: American Revolution GeoTrail

Yesterday, Tom and I returned from New Jersey and a brutal six days working on the American Revolution GeoTrail. I first learned about it last year, while looking up information for 2020's Metro Gathering, which was being held in conjunction with the kick-off of the GeoTrail. Well, the event didn't happen, due to COVID, but the GeoTrail launch did. 77 caches were placed throughout the northern half of New Jersey, at locations significant to the American Revolution. The first 100 geocachers to find a minimum of 50 of these caches - 27 of which are required - will be awarded a geocoin. Unfortunately, one of the required caches is inside the Ford Mansion (Washington's Headquarters), which has been closed to the public ever since the COVID epidemic. We'll have to go back when it re-opens in order to earn our geocoin.

For the most part, we really enjoyed our time visiting the historic locations and learning the stories about the people that helped form our nation. It was hard to tell how some of the locations tied in to the person or event being featured by the geocache, but aside from that, our enjoyment was only lessened by the heat and the cicadas! Tom loves history, so he was constantly stopping and talking to people we encountered to hear them tell the stories. I'll enjoy putting some of the pictures that we took into a photobook.

Tom's biggest criticism of this adventure was that too many of the caches were in the woods, under a log, at the base of a tree. He just doesn't understand that finding a place to hide a geocache isn't always easy, and making geocaches creative is even harder, especially with something of this magnitude. And I'm the one who had a reaction to something I came into contact with, so what's he so concerned about??? My criticism, which was more like an annoyance, was with documentation. Somewhere, I believe that I saw that the website address was a .com, so it took a few tries to get the correct address. And when I tried to send in my passport, the e-mail address on the website was incorrect, but the one on the passport was correct. Like I said, just a bunch of annoying things.

With all of that being said, I would definitely recommend this GeoTrail. It's obvious that a lot of time and effort were put into finding locations, researching topics and writing geocache descriptions. Tom and I learned a lot, and we plan to return to New Jersey and visit the remaining GeoTrail locations, even if the geocaches are archived.