Tennessee & Surrounding Area Rest Stop Caches

Middle TN has a wealth of geocaches. Searching a swath as small as .5 mile from any of the three interstates running through Nashville turns up literally hundreds of caches, many of which can be done in only minutes from the interstate. This doesn't try to list those. This list is an attempt to enumerate simply the rest area caches.

I-24 NorthWest of Clarksville to the GA state line. Southpaw's "Park & Rides" along the way are good substitutes.

I-40 from West of Memphis to the East side of Knoxville.

I59 in Alabama and Georgia.

I-65 from Louisville,KY through Nashville to the AL state line.

I-75 North of Knoxville to the Kentucky state line

I-81 from Bristol to intersection of I-40 east of Knoxville:

Contributions

To add an entry, just mail the interstate the list applies to, the GC#'s and the name of the cache. There is no need to write HTML or include links - the GC# is all that's needed. Example: 
	I40
	GC1234 Go West Young Man
	GC4321 Eastbound and down
To add a new interstate or region, include a brief textual description of the road you're adding, the range you're covering, and a list of the caches in that same format. Submit change request

Making of...

The original list was originally made by using GPSBabel to spin a collection of GPX files for the area plus middle KY comprising that I had laying around into one giant file. I then used Microsoft Streets and Trips to create two point (start, end) routes along the interstates and used "find nearby places" around "entire route" to get a list of caches that were no more than .3 miles from the road. I skimmed the list and manually picked ones that I either knew were rest area caches or that have names that sounded like ones. I then build a little UNIX shell script to take the GC#'s and build this web page.

Now that GPSBabel has the ability to find waypoints along a route, I really should respin the whole thing to build one honkin' huge pocket query of TN and use Delorme to lay a route along every interstate, then do something like gpsbabel -i gpx -f tn.gpx -x arc,file=i65,distance=500f -o s_and_t ... The problem with that it that it gets caches that aren't rest area caches but that are close to the interstate and would drop a rest area cache that happens to be 501 feet off the ramp. So I don't know that additional automation in this case is really any better...

I don't plan to maintain this file by myself. If you know of additions or deletions, please let me know via email. Include the data in the same format as you see on the page.

This page last modified January 16, 2012