9 June 2013 Lake County GeoTour

Lake County which is near our home has the first Geocaching GeoTour in the area. These GeoTours are put together jointly with the sponsor and the staff from Groundspeak. They are designed to bring visitors to the area as Geo-Tourists. I don't think we qualify as tourists, but we were willing to try the caches since they were all smalls. Our post yard-work adventures this evening took us to the parking lot of the visitors bureau, a local playhouse, Wildwood Park, and Fairport Harbor lighthouse. We had fun on a quiet evening out, but I'm not really certain the attractions are going to make a geocacher set aside the gps and spend the day visiting (and spending money).

We stopped at the visitor center on a Sunday evening so of course they were closed. We travel a lot and other than the visitor center at Wytheville and a couple of visitor center's in West Virginia I can't remember any of these offering information or knowledgeable volunteers that added any great ideas for my travels or were even open tourist-type hours. This one's near the local minor league baseball stadium, but if minor league baseball were your delight, I'm certain the internet would have given you all the traveling information you needed before you arrived.

Our remaining stops were in nicer locations, but not the type of attractions to make either of us say we need to stop what we are doing and spend money or we need to come back to visit here later. There seemed to be some sort of contest related to the GeoTour and uploading images of ourselves with the cache. We had fun with a couple of locations, including an award-winning dramatic stage moment at the playhouse. ;-0 I'm not a big fan of taking one of our pictures at each cache and we are not active in social media so we had fun with a few photos and opted to just collect the smilies after that. We really enjoyed a chance to spot multiple cedar waxwings in the wooded area around the playhouse.

A nice resting spot at Mantor's Wildwood Park

For tourism power, the Fairport Harbor lighthouse was one of the two stops this evening that can draw visitors. The lighthouse is staffed by volunteers and has okay, but not amazing hours. By the time we arrived, it was closed. So was the rest of the town on a beautiful summer evening in July. Ohio like so many non-tourist states just doesn't get how hard you have to work at being successful in tourism. After evening one, we will keep seeking the rest of the series. They are not amazing caches at must-see loactions, but they were a pleasant way to spend an evening. I did think it was interesting that many of these have a 24/7 attribute. I had to wonder, why would you bring visitors/tourists to an area and them tell them it is okay to cache 24/7 when most of the attractions are closed and the local police are most likely to think you are up to bad behavior?