After finally getting the route plan ing software working properly - and getting the route also transferred to the Tomtom - I now have a better idea of the scale of what we're trying to achieve.
In the process I also discovered a real useful piece of software. Tyre (www .tyre.tk) is a free download (ad supported) which allows you to import waypoints (in my case this was a GPX file exported from my other favorite caching program GSAK) which are then autorouted by the google maps API.
There is an "optimize" option which purports to show the best route - though it added almost 2 hours onto my manually selected route - though I'm not sure I was using it correctly.
That said, the app provides a great way to visualize your route - an even better, it will save out route files that can be used with Garmin or TomTom in car GPS units. It will even allow to to "split" a waypoint list to account for tomtoms rather pathetic 48 waypoint itineraries.
Anyway what did I learn from all this is that just the driving portion of the trip down to Hamilton is going to take just over four hours. If we calculate that we plan a maximum of 5 mins per cache search time (from the second we stop) then we are looking at close on 11 hours to reach Hamilton.
Assuming we hit our first cache at 8am we'll be in Hamilton by 7pm - not actually such a bad thing as it will be a bit quieter then. That said, it would be good to get there earlier so I'm kind of hoping we can average less than the five minutes!
It's certainly going to be a mission :)
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