Upon our arrival in Maui, we decided to accomplish our objective first. What was that? As you may remember, the first was to return to a massively beautiful island but the second was to find and log our 2,000th geocache.

When we touched down, that accomplished the first part of the goal. Naturally getting settled had to happen before we could cross the second off of our list. At the time of touchdown, we had 1,998 geocaches logged. That left us with a minimum of two to find.

Number 1,998 was a nice little cache snuggling up against a fence in a beach-access type park across the street from the farmers’ market in Ka’anapali. “Cool! That was easy enough! No sweat!” Then we headed toward “the big one.”

Or so we thought. Based on the fact that we weren’t “locals,” we encountered a few problems. First, we put our sights on one and managed to drive within seventy feet of it. The problem? It was located in a hugely upscale area that provided, essentially, private parking for their guests only. So, we were handicapped, to say the least. We tried to approach it from a different direction but, still, were thwarted.

Feeling discouraged, we decided to look again at the cache named, “Sugar Cane Train.” We’d driven by that one thinking, “There’s no way we’re gonna park across a busy 5-lane street and scamper up a substantial mound of dirt and rock covered in foliage…on the other side of the street!”

At one point, we even saw a little train on the tracks running parallel to the (essentially) highway. Eventually, we turned onto something that ran parallel to the tracks. Though it didn’t look or feel like a road, it ended up being what we’d been hoping for. At last! A safe, easy way to cache #2,000!

From that point, it was a snap! There it was…a camo-taped lock-and-lock container resting at the base of a nice little bolder and hidden by a rock. Taking the celebratory photo above was challenging but, as you see, we managed to use the nearby railroad track and a timer.

Objective: Geocache number two thousand found and logged in Maui? Check! Mission accomplished!