Matthew Klem - The Caravan Chronicles

The Caravan Chronicles

Matthew Klem

Published by Matthew Klem / Magestik Publishing

Copyright 2019 Matthew Klem / Magestik Publishing

All rights reserved

www.caravan-chronicles.com

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher and/or author.

Some names and other identifying features of individuals portrayed in this book may have been changed. Other individuals real names have been used with explicit permission from them.

Photo credits: Matthew Klem, Paul Steeves, Ken Arsenault, Mark Knowles

Newspaper article courtesy of The Times & Transcript

Front and Rear Cover Artwork courtesy of Norm Delaney

Map images provided by Google Maps 2019 Google, INEGI

Geocaching.com 2019 Groundspeak Inc.

ISBN: 978-0-9865081-5-8

DEDICATION

To my son Dylan who reminded me it doesnt matter what anyone else thinks.

Preface

Where I give the lowdown on where and how this book came to be.

D uring this trip, I had a journal where I was making notes about anything significant that we encountered. Often I would forget to jot something down and would come back to it at a later time that day or even later along the trip. During the trek home, Paul and I spoke about the things I had written down, and I had said I intended to do a nice lengthy write-up about the trip for our website. What he didnt know at the time was that there were two reasons for me wanting to take so many notes about the trip.

It was always my intention to sit down and write out as much detail as I could about our journey and experiences we had while traveling across the United States. Whether it was in a single blog post on our website or a series of posts on another blog, I knew that I had to put it down while it was still fresh. As time passes, the minutia of each one of those days gets harder to recall. I wanted to make sure that much like many of the other big trips I had taken, there was a written account somewhere that I could go back to and remind myself of what had happened. But along with just wanting to write it down for posterity, a part of me thought that maybe there would be enough material to write an entire book.

Before the trip, I had finished the first draft of another book I had written about many of my other travel experiences around the world. With the bulk of that book now behind me, I was looking for my next big writing project. But honestly, by the time the trip was over and I reviewed my notes, I started to wonder if there was enough material to write a book at all.

So I decided I would sit down and write whatever I could remember and then decide what to do with it later. As I started writing pieces here and there, I would post little snippets to Facebook to gauge a little bit of the reaction. During outings with Paul, hed often ask me how my write-up was going, and Id tell him that its a work in progress. By the time I got through to the end, I had realized there was just too much here to post as a blog entry, and so The Caravan Chronicles was born.

For those who have never heard of, or know very little about the hobby of geocaching, dont let that hold you back from perusing the pages that follow. Everything you need to know about the hobby as it applies to this trip is within these chapters. And for those of you who have signed a log, written a TFTC somewhere, or have said just one more... while out in the wild, youll recognize some of our antics and relate to some of our woes.

But no matter who you are, I hope this story puts a smile on your face and maybe inspires you to take a road trip somewhere.

Finding
a
New
Adventure

Why we chose to take on a crazy road trip like this and how geocaching led us to it.

D riving along a red dirt road, one of the boys yells out that we are getting closer. Ron pulls the car over, and all four of us head into the woods. The bush here was incredibly thick. Spruce trees surrounded each of us within moments of entering the wooded area, and before we knew it, no one could see anything except the branches of whatever tree happened to smack you in your face.

Im at Ground Zero, but I got nothing from one voice.

Mines just spinning. Any luck? another asks.

Known as the drunken bee dance, the four of us had engaged in a relatively common practice of walking circles around the same area looking for the same thing. Examining every branch, and every limb of every tree we spotted, no one was coming up with the find. The hint itself seemed incredibly simple, and the name of the geocache seemingly gave it away. We suspected it was small as much of what we had found earlier could easily fit in your hand. But just as I was about to call it and tell the boys to move on to the next one, I hear Pauls voice.

Ive got it! Paul squawked with a bit of joy in his voice.

We all had a small sigh of relief and started to head back towards the car.

You guys have got to see this, he said. The name of what we were looking for was Another micro in the woods (GC1GVCM) and given that the term micro depicts the container to be small enough to fit in your hand, I cast my doubts on whether or not it made much sense to see yet another film canister in a tree. But we all knew that Paul wouldnt have grabbed our attention for something so simple. The rest of us made our way through the trees, following his voice until eventually, we came upon the micro he had found in the woods.

Sitting along the branch of one of the smaller spruce trees was a microwave oven. An actual microwave oven, in the middle of the woods, hanging from a tree was the micro we had been looking for. Inside the oven was a tobacco canister that had the log sheet, and all four of us started laughing. Someone snapped a picture of Ken beside the microwave before we all signed the log, put the container back in the oven, and kept on moving. The misdirection of the name combined with the hilarious idea of a microwave in a tree have made that geocache stand out as one of my all-time favorites in the 12 years that I have been geocaching.