April 5–7, 2022 · Chester and an Illinois county run
djpd1023 was eleven counties away from filling in his Illinois geocaching map. He invited CanisMinor and me to help knock out the rest. Somehow, in the middle of a trip planned around county lines, we ended up spending part of a day looking for Popeye and his friends.
Eleven counties to go
The three of us headed out from Joliet on April 5. Illinois has 102 counties, and the ones djpd1023 still needed weren’t all waiting neatly along the same highway. CanisMinor and I had a few gaps of our own, so we had plenty of reasons to get off the main roads. My log says we drove more than a thousand miles and visited 18 Illinois counties by the time the trip was over. It also says the rain seemed to follow us. Our matching shirts said, “Sounds like a lot of windshield time.” They were right.
One of our first-day finds took us to Tunnel Hill (GCHVJ1), where an old railroad tunnel sits at the end of a deep rock cut.
Popeye’s hometown
We woke up just outside Chester on the second day. The town sits above the Mississippi River in Randolph County, and it’s the hometown of Elzie C. Segar, who created Popeye. At the Welcome Center we found Welcome to Popeye’s Hometown, v. 2.0 (GC4JY78). The bronze Popeye has stood in Segar Memorial Park since 1977. From there we could look out over the river and the Chester Bridge.
The bronze sailor turned out to be the start of a bigger sightseeing stop. Popeye Character Trail (GC4AHC1) and Popeye Character Trail #2 (GC8TEE9) sent us around town to look for statues and collect clues. We also found Chester Square (GC9J9CT), near the Popeye museum. The clues gave us a reason to look closely at the statues and see parts of Chester we could have driven right past.
djpd1023 wrote that keeping track of the multis and Adventure Labs felt like cramming for college exams. I can see what he meant. Here we were in a town full of cartoon characters, juggling clues because we’d decided to do a little sightseeing on a county run.
Filling in the last blanks
We still had more miles to cover. In Missouri, we worked on The Missouri Star (GC7KT0Q), a Geo-Art where the cache icons make a star on the map. On April 7, back in Illinois, one of our finds brought us to the Kampsville Ferry (GC63V0D) on the Illinois River. After two days of figuring out how to get to the next county, a cache at a ferry landing felt right at home on the itinerary.
By the end of the trip, djpd1023 had all 102 Illinois counties. CanisMinor and I had filled in a few of our own gaps along the way. I’d gone along to help a friend finish his map. Chester is the stop I’d go back to even if everyone in the car already had Randolph County.
Field Notes
- Trip: April 5–7, 2022. Chester stop: April 6.
- Companions: djpd1023 and CanisMinor
- Route: more than 1,000 miles, 18 Illinois counties, and a Missouri Geo-Art detour
- Milestone: djpd1023 finished all 102 Illinois counties
- Chester highlight: Popeye Character Trail (GC4AHC1)
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