terratin

Are you in my area? A tree collection with the hint "magnetic" Argh! What I also 'love' "under rock" if it's a big pile of rocks We searched for ages to find the right rock.

Not bad! For me, it usually means a lot of extra work as I need to prove that my layover is not more expensive than the direct flight. But certainly something to keep in mind, and we did that once: When we moved from Qatar back to Europe we did a small vacation in the UAE, and collected caches there and in the Oman

Congrats on that! I don't think I'll manage as I cannot sleep on planes and will be really knackered upon arrival on Saturday. And then I'll have business meetings (well, training) every weekday from 8.30-4.30 or so and leave the next Saturday again but at least I should be able to get some caches in the neighbourhood

Well, I'm on the wrong side of Houston, unfortunately (West Side), and I'll probably be too jet lagged to drive a car. But it would have been a good opportunity, yes!

New colours on the map coming soon In two weeks we'll add Italy and Vatican City State, in June I'll be visiting Houston (new state), August will add the Faroes to our map, and you might even be able to see them on our stats if you use a magnifying glass and I still have enough airmiles to cash in for flights to either Finland, one of the Baltic countries, or Poland. Lets see what we chose.

As a bike owner, I want the bike icon on my bike! Mrs. terratin

Congrats Mrs. Terratin

This puzzle (6 Ord) used a similar sliding scale to reduce the D rating with each new hint. When I found it, it was at D4.5, but the CO kept on posting hints and decreasing the difficulty. And on hindsight it does make sense: Without giving away too much, the puzzle relies on local knowledge in the sense that local knowledge actually hampers seeing the solution. Not being native to the area myself, I didn't have that 'block' and found it really easy to crack. But if the CO would have stopped posting hints, my guess is most locals just won't get it. So sometimes it makes sense to continue posting hints, even if the puzzle is already solved. Cheers, Peter

Did you click on a malicious link somewhere? I read somewhere else on the forum that this could be the case if you see these kind of ads on the geocaching website.

We have a single account and most of our finds are done together, about 80%. Mrs. Terratin accounts for almost 11% and I the remaining 9%. The only "issue" we're having, is that Mrs. Terratin travels a bit more than me. This usually means we make arrangements upfront who's going to cache and when; mostly because we don't want Mrs. Terratin to find a cache relatively far from home, then me finding one near our home location and the next day Mrs. Terratin finds another cache far away again. In practice this "rule" means Mrs. Terratin goes caching and I simply don't. (And when I tag along it usually means I'm out exploring most of the day and finding a couple of caches, while Mrs. Terratin is sitting in an office, so that's great "compensation".) The real "problem" with having a single account is when Mrs. Terratin visits a country we have not found a cache yet and I cannot accompany her. In this case we upfront decide how likely it is if we visit that particular country together some day; when we think we will, Mrs. Terratin happily picks up a cache (or two), but when we think it's highly unlikely we'll ever visit that country together, she doesn't. We do discuss separate accounts every now and then, but always end up wondering what the point is. Two accounts would mean (almost) twice as many logs to write and two most likely identical find logs on a single cache doesn't really add anything. In fact I think having separate accounts would only lead to more discussion: where would we draw the line if we both found a cache? What if I stay in the car and Mrs. Terratin hops out to pick up a roadside cache? Or why should I also climb up that tree when Mrs. Terratin already done that? Etc... So, no thanks, one account is just fine for us! Cheers, Mr. Terratin

This has happened to us a couple of times as well (getting asked for hints on puzzle from other CO's). In all (most?) cases the asker wasn't local and had questions about some puzzles we solved & found. Take fi our last years trip to Paris; we received a couple of requests for hints: The 'issue' for those requesting hints was a lack of response from CO's or not understanding the response from the CO due to communicating in a different not native language. So what happened is the cacher scrolls down the found list and emails the first logger who logged in English and fire their questions at them. Anyway, I do reply & give hints and I don't think there's anything wrong with that, as -at least for me- there's no real difference in asking google or someone you know or a fellow cacher. I'm in a similar situation at the moment; I'm working on two puzzles in Rome and am stuck on both. A little push in the right direction would be great, but so far no response at all from the CO's (after asking for hints twice), so I'm considering asking another finder for a little push in the right direction. As cache owner I'm always happy to provide extra hints/additional help and I don't mind at all if someone 'bypasses' me and asks someone else. Bottom line is that our caches are out there to be found, one way or another. Cheers, Mr. Terratin

A cache filled to the brim with stale pee....Yuck. Cheers, Mr. Terratin

That's not quite true. In a city the GPS signal bounces around quite a lot due to buildings, in such areas more often than not GE is more accurate than the GPS, despite taking multiple GPS readings. This at least goes for where I live (Copenhagen) and I'm assuming it's also true for a number of other cities. Having said that, the difference between GE and the averaged GPS readings seldom is more than 10m, so -especially with a good hint- not something to really worry about. Cheers, Mr. Terratin

Yup. Someone dropped a nice log on one of our earthcaches the other day. They're new, so I dropped them an email and even sent the logging questions I needed them to answer for the earthcache. I'm giving them another couple days, then I'll send another email with a suspense. Once that deadline passes, I'll regretfully delete the log if they still haven't followed up. Yep, that occasionally happens to us as well Oh well, things got better since one of ours is not situated at the end of a (newer, and now deleted) power trail anymore I suppose the quality of logs will go up again as well.. if someone passes by at all Mrs. Terratin

Wild guess: he might have logged your cache with the geocaching app. Maybe using this doesn't count as logging into the site Mrs terratin

When souvenirs were first released I didn't really care about them. But when the new country ones suddenly popped up last week I got really excited. And now I would love to have souvenirs for all countries that there are. Hey, I love visiting other countries to cache there, I love my country stats, and the souvenirs just add this little bit of extra there. I really do hope that GS reconsiders and publishes more. Can I now have a souvenir for Mexico please? Oh, and Qatar! It's my third highest country count. Mrs. terratin

Part of the pre-vacation fun -a very big part- is preparing caches: translate anything which needs translating, look at maps how to get somewhere, scrutinize logs to check for additional hints and general tips, etc etc etc. It can take weeks, but still, even before we found the first-cache-on-vacation I've already had so much fun! Cheers, Mr. Terratin

Fingers crossed for you! I do remember hearing some serious pub crawl fun when I was studying in Amsterdam, however I don't know when and where as I'm not really into that. Traveling for business is mostly technical training for me. By the look of things there's nothing really interesting this year. Just the usual trip to London, and if I'm very lucky maybe a trip to Houston. That would at least add another US state to my stats Not that I'm picking training based on location ... Mrs. terratin

I would have done the same! A while ago we decided to have a several day layover in Abu Dhabi. We drove to Al Ain and over the border into the Oman, which was them still possible without paperwork at one border crossing. We picked up the one cache we wanted to have, started our car... and found out it didn't start anymore. A friendly truck driver transported the car back to a garage literally a handful of meters from the border. When they could not find anything we finally called the rental company and upon the question where we were we answered "Al Buraimi" and got an angry shout back: "But that's in Oman! You're not supposed to be there". Well.. few minutes later the car started again. Turned out the rental company had put a tracker into the car and interrupted the engine at a certain distance from the border. Oopsie.. But we got the country and had a lot of fun Mrs. terratin

Oh yes, I know what you mean. My cache map would be quite a bit more complete had I started much earlier. What is also annoying: I could have added Kazakhstan to the map last year, but didn't pick up the only cache in town for various reasons. One was that my driver didn't quite understand he should stop at that particular park in the rain, not the next shopping mall Go for it! And you're certainly welcome here in CPH. Give me a shout when you're around. Be sure to hit up Scotland and not just the rest of it then- great scenery and general awesomeness aside, you can then get a "bonus" in a couple years when they split off. LOL, my thought exactly! Funny though, I've been to Scotland several times on business but I have yet to find a cache there Oh well, next time.

Maybe the Geocache Google Earth Viewer could be helpful: http://www.geocaching.com/about/google.aspx (Here you can also find how to download and use it). It's a great tool to get a quick overview of how many caches are available in a certain area; much faster than using the Beta maps. The drawback (for me at least) is that this viewer does not take your finds into account (ie it shows ALL caches in an area) and the coordinates of each cache is approximated (thus not the exact coordinates as listed on the site). Cheers, Mr. Terratin

We love caching and we love caching during vacation as you get to see different types of hides and the caches are quite often hidden at interesting locations you would not have seen without a cache. I do love adding further countries to my geocaching stats map. On average we've been getting about 4 new countries per year since we started caching. The recurring discussion every year is whether we should spend our vacation in a country we've already cached in or to something new (and what!). For this year we came up with Rome and Vatican State (2 new countries), Faroe Islands (new) and Turkey (just one found during a very lengthy layover). Who else likes 'collecting' countries, and what are your plans for this year? Mrs. terratin

No, it doesn't as I'm guessing a lot of people will have pictures of being on-site even if the EC wasn't published yet. However, creating logging tasks which require specific observation at the location will go a long way in preventing logs from 'before the Earthcache was published', as imo most people enjoy sites and are not particularly paying attention to details required to answer logging tasks. Cheers, Mr. Terratin

01/04/2007

There are many caches within walking distance of Copenhagen Kastrup airport. Sometimes they vanish quickly, but equally quickly new ones appear as well.