AAR: Heart of the Civil War Heritage Area US 250th GeoTour

This weekend, Tom and I started - and completed - the Heart of the Civil War US 250th GeoTour. This GeoTour was released on September 19, 2025, and it brings geocachers to the Heart of the Civil War Heritage Area, three counties in Maryland where there is a lot of history from that time. We had completed the Heart of the Civil War Heritage Area GeoTrail several years ago, and while we visited several of the same sites this time, the GeoTour focused more on the general history of some locations, rather than their relationship to the Civil War.
This GeoTour consisted of 21 geocaches of all types that needed to be found or completed to earn the souvenir, but 15 physical caches had to be found, and the code words inside recorded, to be eligible for the geocoin. As a "bonus," for three of the mystery caches, Adventure Labs had to be completed in order to receive the coordinates. There were also two GeoTour-related events (Kick-Off and Coin Redemption events), as well as a Block Party being held at the same location as one of the GeoTour caches. The Block Party was something unto itself, and we didn't stay long for that, but I did notice that there were a heck of a lot of Adventure Labs waiting to be completed. So, 21 geocaches, three Adventure labs with five locations each, and several events made for a super busy weekend.
We were just about able to complete the GeoTour in one day, caching from 7-7. There was one cache that we had to skip and come back to the next day because the gates to the site were closed and locked when we came by initially. Otherwise, the caches were pretty easy to find, despite the difficulty/terrain ratings. In most cases, we spent less than 10 minutes searching for each cache. We also learned something along the way, and that's part of what makes these types of things so great.