I'm trying to trap those so I can get a realistic geocoding, but my error routine is just skipping it.

I'm not familiar with this module, but

eval{
    $latlong = $geocoder->geocode(location => $location);
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Apparently geocode dies here and the rest of the eval block is skipped. From the source of the module (V3):

$param{location} = shift;
...
my $location = $param{location}
        or Carp::croak("Usage: geocode(location => \$location)");
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Maybe try to check manually whether your $location is empty?