We decided, mostly on a whim, to branch out a bit and do a geocaching road trip. Up to this point, the furthest cache we had found was no more than a ten minute drive from the house. We grabbed our supplies, loaded the cooler, and hit the road to go south of the border. Okay, okay, so we went south of the Virginia/North Carolina border, but it was still an adventure.

This wasn't exactly our first trip to the Outer Banks, so we've come to follow a bit of a routine when making the trip. We stopped, as usual, at the Border station, a gas station and gift shop that straddles the border. We came across a micro with about 5 feet of Virginia left, then crossed the border for a couple of firsts. We've come across plenty of micros, but this one was our first bison tube. This also made our first find in another state.



A few miles down the road, we decided to detour for a spell. We had seen that there was a travel bug hotel about a mile off the main road. Having never found one before, we thought it would be a worthwhile trip. What we found was an ammo can on steroids, complete with what we thought was a really cool idea for cache swag. We found a disposable camera with 9 photos left. Well, 8 now. We snapped a picture of the two of us with the monster cache, and placed it back in. We traded geocoins, and were promptly on our way.

The ultimate purpose of this trip was for, of all things, a travel bug. If you've been following from the beginning, you've seen the TB that came all the way from Hagenhill, Germany. We thought that if it wanted to see some beautiful places, Cape Hatteras was a great place to take it. We discovered a webcam cache, and added that to our experience before heading back.



We thought it would be only fitting that we dropped the travel bug in North Carolina instead of bringing it all the way back home. On the way back, we booted up the GPS and decided to try to find little Hagenhill a fitting home. We found what we thought would be a decent spot, and trekked a little off the beaten path. Even before getting out of the car, the mosquitoes were swarming through the windows.Poor Kesara made a whopping 30 feet before deciding this would be a good time for me to sharpen my caching skills and find this one solo. After the fastest log signing in history, a mad dash, and half a gallon of blood loss later, we decided to find a better home for him. Our next three decisions all turned out to be caches that were DEFINITELY not made for night caching, so we ultimately decided to pay another visit to the travel bug hotel we hit earlier today for a quick little drop-off.

We've been coming to find more and more that one of our favorite things about geocaching is the thrill that comes with going to a place that you may have been a dozen times before, and finding these amazing little places you didn't even know existed.We can't tell you how many times we've been to the outer banks and driven right past some amazing places, simply because we had no idea they were there. That won't be the case anymore...

~Brody