Current at 11/6/2011 (Online waypoint URL) You have already found this cache! Master Index    Nearest Caches Dumoulin Pioneer Cache by Xplorer and Ramblin' Rose (1.5/1.5) N48° 59.328  W97° 14.739 (WGS84) UTM  14U   E 628344  N 5427694 Use waypoint: GC16G5D Size: Micro    Hidden on 10/6/2007 In North Dakota, United States Difficulty:     Terrain:                           Small historical pull-out just before the border! TRUCKER FRIENDLY Small black key holder with log sheets. Take your own pencil. Please re-hide as well or better than you find it! The first church in the northwest was built about 300 feet from the historical marker by Father Joseph Dumoulin in 1818 along with a school and cemetery. The mission was abandoned, then rebuilt and later moved to Pembina. The cemetery with its pioneers remained and you can visit it if you want to take the time.

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8/3/2009 by Kabuthunk
It may be a tad late in logging the cache... but this was the final cache of my vacation to Minneapolis. It was also my first cache ever found in North Dakota (although my second cache found in the USA... yeah, I didn't get a chance to find many ). I also found a benchmark (and DNF'd another one), but that's besides the point .

Anyhoo... we had spent the weekend out in Minneapolis, and had thus started out on Friday, July 31st. Being as we started quite early in the morning (well, ok... 7:00am, but that's still ridiculously early for us ), we were moreso wanting to just get to our destination as fast as possible on the way there. Thus, any North Dakota caches would have to wait until the trip back.

- insert one vacation -

One vacation later, we began our long journey back home. Having work on Tuesday (yay for August long weekend out in Manitoba), we were still wanting to get home quickly, so that we weren't completely burnt out for the work day... but I was determined to at least find one geocache in every State we went through. Ok, well... that would be two of them . At first, there was actually a bit of worry on my part that I wouldn't get a chance to find anything in North Dakota. By the time we were willing to slow down our big 'push' to get back home and take an exit into a rest stop, we were in the middle of nowheresville, North Dakota. Barely any caches were around on my GPS. Having used a pocket query for 'along a route', I only had any geocaches that were within about 1km of the road. On one particular geocache that I had planned to go after (WOW! Manitoba Micro), at the time when we were nearing it, there was a dearth of traffic on the left, and with the rest stop unfortunately requiring us to be on THAT side of the highway for once, we were unable to early enough get over so we could pull into the off-ramp. Adding to this was that my wife had a toothache at the time, and was trying to avoid added frustration... of which trying to get over several lanes while going 75 miles an hour without killing ourselves... would constitute. And so, we passed by that geocache (which I was quite confused as to why it was named after Manitoba, despite the fact that we were still quiet clearly in the USA... however after reading the description, it makes a lot more sense now ). Zooming out on my GPS, I didn't see any other geocache symbols until what I thought was at Customs... where I especially didn't want to make myself conspicuous (not that we were smuggling anything... but I'm quite paranoid by nature, and as well work as a Customs broker, so I know what pricks Customs officials can be). Nor did I know if any of the caches at Customs were in Manitoba or North Dakota. Thus... I was depressed, since I thought that my single last chance to find a cache in North Dakota this trip had zipped by .

However, on our approach to Customs, I discovered that there WAS still one cache in North Dakota... and it was far enough away from Customs for me to be comfortable going after it . Convincing my wife to stop (she felt kinda bad about missing the last one), I quickly hopped out... and spent about 10 minutes hunting around. I ended up checking my palm pilot for the cache description... and about 2 minutes after, BAM, had the geocache in hand . Don't know if I'd call it a 'Small' size though... that's like... half the size of an Altoids container.

In either case, thank you GREATLY for allowing me my one last chance to find my first North Dakota cache... and learn something at the location to boot . You made the end of my vacation great, and it was awesome to be able to finally find a cache out around our Southern neighbours . Two states down... a whole lot go to. Heck, I haven't even found any caches in Canada outside Manitoba yet .

Took: Nothing
Left: Logbook entry and micromail ball