(Winter hunters can also drive and find the nearest available places to park, then hike from each spot.)
The Ozaukee Interurban Trail is a new paved, multi-use trail that crosses the county from north to south passing through eight of Ozaukee County’s 16 communities. As the name suggests, the right-of-way the trail uses is primarily that of the historic interurban railway that connected Ozaukee’s communities with Milwaukee from 1905 to 1951. You can read more about the trail and receive trail maps at this website.
The portion of the trail chosen for this cache starts in downtown Cedarburg, passes by tranquil backyards and cemeteries, follows streets through Grafton, becomes a rural tree-shrouded trail again to Port Washington, then leads you to the Lake Michigan lakefront in downtown Port Washington. It then retraces the same route back to the starting place in Cedarburg. Depending on how fast you bicycle, expect to spend 3 to four hours pursuing this one. If kids are riding along, you may want to break up the route into portions to do over several different days. The trail is mostly flat with a few small hills in Grafton and Port Washington. Yes, it may be possible to drive to the nearest parking spots for each waypoint and walk from there, but you’ll end up doing a lot of backtracking and you will miss the whole point of this hunt. Bicycling is definitely the preferred mode of transportation for this cache.
When you follow this route you will pass by two virtual geocaches, my “Tourist Attraction Virtual Cache” and Yawningdog’s “Hot Seat”. You may want to print those pages so you can log those if you have not done so already.
Start by parking in downtown Cedarburg in a public lot at N43 17.899 W87 59.356. Then pick up the trail on the old Interurban Bridge, which is near the first waypoint listed for this cache. Each subsequent waypoint marker should be fairly easy to find when you arrive at each set of coordinates. The waypoints will lead you to Port Washington and back to Cedarburg, with the next-to-last waypoint located a few blocks south of the parking coordinates. From that marker point, you may wish to drive to the final location, which is where the cache container is located. I located it in a wooded park instead of along the trail so you won’t have to worry about people observing you as you hunt for the cache. Parking for the final cache is available approximately 0.2 miles east of the final coordinates. The geocache container is an 8-inch wide, round, clear kitchen container with a white lid.
Note that portions of the OIT route travel along city streets and rural roads and trail signs are not yet posted. For that reason, I am providing two additional tools you may wish to use.
First is a text file of detailed directions for riding the trail from Cedarburg to Port Washington. If you are unfamiliar with the trail, I recommend that you print this file and take it with you on your ride. You can find the directions here.
The second tool is for Garmin users who use MapSource. It is a downloadable MapSource file that contains the route of the OIT. I created the route based on my GPSR readings while riding the trail to set up this cache. It does not contain the location of the geocache waypoints, but it does contain waypoints for the major turns you will need to make to stay on the trail when it winds along city streets in Grafton and Port Washington. Note also that the route does not go all the way to the northernmost geocache waypoint in Port Washington. This is because I didn’t want to reveal the location of that waypoint in the downloadable file. You can download the MapSource file here.
Now I ask you… Have you ever before hunted a muticache and received the route ahead of time? It’s all about the journey. Good luck!