Phantomaniac

As a fellow newbie, I don't bother with that kind of thing. I'm sure I miss out on caches, but I don't have a full G.P.S. unit, nor can I shell out the money for one (admittedly I wouldn't want to, either, even if I could). I just go to the site and try to figure out the clues. To date, most of the ones I've found were done so by analyzing (non-spoiler) photographs left by other cachers, pondering the comments left by others (whether they found it or not), and so on. Again, I might miss some, but I don't consider it a huge deal. It seems like all I really need (thus far anyway) is the app on my phone and a not-terrible sense of direction. As a caveat, I've not found many yet, and I don't count one virtual one because it's just going to a location and waiting for the phone to realize I'm actually there. So, take my thoughts on the matter with a handful of salt.

I'm very new to geocaching, myself. I started on geocaching last Spring when I bought the full app (though find I generally prefer the free app, anyway, as I find it easier to navigate), but aside from a "virtual" cache (basically just standing next to a plaque in my city), I couldn't find anything. I'd poked at it over the months, and on New Year's Day, I was about to give up. I'd hunted for some without spotting a single one (I understood, intellectually, what the difficulty rating meant [and stuck to the one, one-point-five difficulty caches], but because I'd never found a cache before I didn't have the framework with which to build a reference point)--then I stumbled onto one almost by accident. The second one I happened to find because I saw another geocacher grab it, and I began to get enough of a sense of what I was supposed to be looking for to begin finding more and more on my own. There's one four-star difficulty one I'm noodling, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. It's aggravating in a really great way; I have a lot of information and clues to sift through, which is the best sort of aggravation, to me. The ones with a ton of data are the ones I like to mentally gnaw on, to worry at like a Terrier with a bone. I also wonder if I'm the only one who constantly feels like a child playing something between Noir-ish spy fiction (trying to locate secret drops from fellow undercover sorts) and a gumshoe P.I., gathering clues to solve hidden-item mysteries.