I set aside a whole Saturday for geocaching. The question was where to go: with a car and a day from sunrise to sunset, which route collects the most caches I haven’t found yet, with the least driving?

Instead of guessing, I planned the route with a small script. It weighs how long each cache would take against the driving between them, and builds the best day trip it can fit between sunrise and sunset. Multi-caches only count as one find, so long multis rarely make the cut. It chose a loop in Fejér county: Mány – Csákvár – Bodajk – Székesfehérvár – Lake Velence, and wrote a GPX with every stop placed at the cache’s parking spot rather than on the cache itself, so the route doesn’t hide the caches in the Geoládák app.

The plan was made for October 11, but it rained, so I did it two weeks later, on October 24.

  • Finds: 25
  • First and last find: 07:53 and 17:27 (sunset: 17:41)
  • Steps: 23,909
  • Driven: 270 km

The orange line is the route I actually drove, from Google Timeline. The green dots are the 25 finds, numbered in the order I found them; click one for the time and the cache page. The orange dot is the geodetic tower.

Plan versus reality

The plan had 23 caches and two optional ones. I found 22 of the 23, plus three that weren’t in the plan.

The one I skipped was GCEez, a final cache: it only reveals its location once you’ve found the 22 caches in its series, and I haven’t. The planner didn’t know that. It does now: it skips final caches whose prerequisites aren’t all found yet. Instead of it, I found two caches at Kőszárhegy (GCKOKK and GCBKSZ) and took the first optional one, GCMKD, next to the morning’s second cache in Mány.

I missed the other optional one, GCPAVI at Pátka, without noticing: the optional stops were in the GPX as flags but not on the route line, and while driving I only followed the line.

I was also faster than planned: about 24 minutes per find against the 30 the planner had estimated, and that even includes a lunch stop at the Burger King in Székesfehérvár. Comparing the day against the Timeline showed it overestimated both the driving and the time at each cache, so I calibrated it on this day (leaving out the lunch break). It now overestimates by about 7% instead of 50%, which at the shorter late-October daylight should fit one or two more caches.

A geodetic tower

On the way to the first Kőszárhegy cache I stopped at the Újszárhegy geodetic tower. I’ve started collecting these for the HVTE geodetic tower challenge: 107 survey towers built in the 1970s and 80s. This was my third, after Albertirsa and Bajtemetés. The tower is locked; mobile operators have clearly moved in.

Notes from the field

  • At GCAORT there were police right at the cache, so I logged it with the backup password.
  • GCproh looks like it has been looted; I logged it with the owner’s help.
  • GCMH was soaked through. The logbook would have fallen apart if I’d tried to sign it.
  • At GCKOKK the cache was a bit further in than the obvious hiding spot; I put it back where I found it.