Caching without a car

...or truck, motorcycle, or any kind of auto-mobile.

I ended up selling my truck a few months ago. With that money, instead of trading it in for a new (or new-to-me) vehicle, I invested in a new bike. It's become my main source of transportation. I would not call it my "only" source, as I have feet and a unicycle. Having no car to cache with does make it things interesting sometimes, and frustrating at others.

While most of the time, city caches are easy to get to with a bike. I can ride anywhere within the city. Getting out on the dirt roads is also possible, but my bike is a hybrid (more of a mountain bike frame with tires similar to road tires- except a bit wider, but no traction). That hasn't stopped me completely, although it probably isn't the greatest on my tires (or me, since I'm bumping up and down, trying to control my bike while its attempting to skid around). Urban caches and some down dirt roads just outside the city. Easy. It'd work great if I was living in a bigger metro area, like Denver (unicycling worked great there).

In Las Cruces, at least since I've found many of the urban caches, it's not the greatest situation. If I want to go to one of the caches in the mountains, it'd require at least 20-25 miles of riding just to get to mountains and back. This doesn't include going on any trails, hiking. That'd be a tiring day, especially since there area few new caches on biking trails (biking to get to the head of the biking trial, plus biking down that, would be an exhausting day).

I don't want to complain about this- it's just a slight problem to overcome when geocaching. I think the best way to overcome it is to find more friends active in the outdoors who can do my level of activity. This includes mountain biking clubs (although I'd probably turn into a mountain cycling club- by being a unicyclist in a bicyclist-dominated area), search and rescue or hiking groups, etc. This way, when I want to go hiking or down a biking trail, I can plan a trip with others who want to do the same thing (and hopefully get a ride in the process).

In this sense, getting rid of my truck also gets rid of a lot of my solo adventures. Instead of going out and hiking, biking, unicycling, whatever, by myself, I'll be a little bit limited in what I can do alone and forced to interact with friends. At least that's what is planned for now.