awestberry

I read "Scavenger" by David Morrell while on vacation. Geocaching was mentioned sveral times in the book. I thought it might have been made up by the author so I googled it and the addiction began.

I tihnk you have to have a good mix of easy and hard. Where I live, we have a good variety....lots of parking lot micros but quite a few tougher hides in parks and on a college campus nearby (Berry College - 26,000 acres and lots of places to hide caches!). There are enough easy ones that I can grab on the way home from work and some (Lavender Green GCJ1BR) that are like Moby Dick to me (Cap'n Ahab). What is good about some of the easier hides is that you get a feel for how they are hidden and what to look for. There are a couple of micros that are hidden pretty darn well that I haven't found yet. I'm trying to methodically eliminate the easy micros from the showing up evertime I log in. So I guess in response to whether hard caches discourage new cachers, I'd have to say no - as long as there are some easier finds to cut their teeth on.

Hope your trip down here to Georgia is a good one. I'm going to add my vote to the "carry a stick and poke around first" suggestion. It never seems to get cold enough down here to make all the creepy critters totally go dormant. Actually, one of the main rules of Georgia Caching etiquette is to be a gracious host and display southern hospitality by letting the Canadian in the group reach into the hollow stump and feel around for the cache. Oh and before you leave, make sure you get a buch of kudzu to take home with you and transplant. It makes a great groundcover and really looks great in your flowerbeds (at least until the second week when its grows over the top of your house and your car disappears. Seriously, hope your trip down to Dixie is enjoyable.

I totally agree about lpc's sucking. Found one today that just really took the cake. It was a refrigerator magnet with a small homemade log glued to the back of it and stuck to the underside of a lamppost mounting bracket - no container just a refrigerator magnet stuck underneath the cover. It wouldn't have been bad if it had been in an historical area or near a park or something like that. However, it was in a parking lot - right in the dead center of the parking lot - might as well have had a big flashing sign that said "LPC hidden here!!" When we were 250 feet away my 5 year old said "Dad I bet its under the lamppost cover" Just my $.02 worth but maybe there should be a category of cache types specifically for LPC's.

I found something last night that might help. I have an Explorist 210 gpsr. Had it synced up to the laptop last night, went into My Computer and the F drive - the drive assigned to the explorist. Found the Geocache folder and opened one of the .gs files into notepad - that gives you cache name, coordiantes, and hints - no logs or anything but at least you can save some of the basics into a .txt file and save them on the pda. Hope this helps.

I'm another newbie too. I've been caching all of 3 days. I bought a Magellan Explorist 210 and love it. The software is easy to use, gpsr is great in terms of ease of use, accuracy, and battery life. I looked on the net and and tried to find a steal of a price for the unit. My impatience won out and I went to Wal-Mart. Paid $149.99 for the unit and started caching an hour later. Just my $.02 for what it's worth. Good luck!