TheAlabamaRambler

I wouldn't hide one that is hard to open, and would think that finding one is a PITA.

What he said.

IceCreamMan's guide and the advice you've gotten in these replies should help you decide what to do. Basically, do what makes you happy and your guests will enjoy it too. I've hosted everything from a meet and greet at a local restaurant with 10 guests to a 3-day event at the beach for hundreds of cachers and my guests tell me that they have had a ball at all of them. If I were to plan an event today I would reserve a room (free) or space at a local restaurant (Golden Corral or other buffet-style restaurant so they have lots of food choices) and hide two or three caches around the parking lot. I would call out the coordinates (or give them out on slips of paper) and those interested would go find them while the rest of us visited with each other. One was on the trailer hitch on my truck. First to find keeps the cache and or the 'prize' contents. This usually takes those who choose to hunt them away from their table for maybe 15 minutes for each cache. Alternatively I might hide them around the inside of restaurant (with management's permission) in say a fake Coke can on the table or magnetic key holder under someone's chair. I have had a waitress keep it in her pocket and guests had to ask each waitress a particular question to see if she had it. Alternatively give a small cache (called a pocket cache) to the first guest who arrives and everyone has to ask each other if they have it. Something like the Mae West quote immortalized by JoGPS "Is that a cache in your pocket or are you happy to see me?" If you have the cache and someone asks you then you quietly pass the cache to that person. It's a great way to get people talking and interacting with one another. Keep in mind however that none of that is required. As Snoogans said earlier, host it and they will come. You don't need to entertain them. I do it because that's what I enjoy. In fact I hosted one event and had car trouble on the way there. They went on without me and had a good time. Just get cachers together and they'll enjoy themselves. As far as temp caches and multi-logging the event for temp cache finders, if participants don't want to hunt them they won't. If they do, they will. I like giving them choices. They'll participate in the ones they like. I usually do have temp caches. If someone wants to skip them, fine. If they want to multi-log the event, fine. I'm not at all about trying to control people or define for them what they should think 'fun' is. As far as logbooks, I always have one. Most event attendees will expect one and will ask if it is not there. Then I usually throw it away after the event. I'm not about to spend time checking who signed the log against who logged it online.

I don't see a problem here. If you are uncomfortable doing any cache you should pass it by.

Just read the full story.....very funny! Me too. It took me about an hour but it was worth it. About half way through, I actually found myself feeling sorry for Joe and had to give myself a short, sharp reality check . The questions on the form at the end are very very funny. The funniest part is when the 'webmaster' at the linked site asks for donations to support it! If you enjoyed reading this, please consider supporting out site. Wonder how many gullibles reading about a scam were willing to send the 'webmaster' their money?

Go for it, looks good! The 'no buried caches' guideline is to keep folks from DIGGING holes in which to hide or find caches. Landowners don't want folks showing up and digging a bunch of holes trying to find the cache. What you are doing isn't digging and should be perfectly acceptable.

I think the damage potential is over-rated. I've found several of these and pulled on some real ones while hunting them. You have to put some muscle into it to pull up a real one. The fake come right up with very little pull. If you have to try to wrestle it from the ground shame on you for not using common sense. I've pretty much decided not to hide any more micros or I would get some of these.

GC14B0Z Irondale Pit Stop is in its third variation and has been on my front porch since 2004. The current version has been there since 2007. It gets regular visits and I have met a lot of wonderful people who have chosen to knock on the door and meet me. Because of our two yappie dogs I always know if someone is out there but don't open the door unless they call or knock (my phone number is on the listing). As others have mentioned it's probably best not to make folks hunt for it, so my container is a triple-size ammo can that can be seen from the street. My neighbors all know about geocaching and know the cache is there so there's never been a problem. I did get one funny story out of it a couple of years ago when a Mom and her two kids called me and told me they had been searching my porch for 15 minutes and was the cache behind the flower stand? When I quit laughing enough to talk I told her the flower stand was on my neighbors porch! After that I added my address and contact info along with the coords to make it perfectly clear where it is.

Most will, some won't. When I hid my Irondale Park cache years ago I didn't see a No Trespassing sign that was covered up by overgrown brush. It was there for quite some time, many months, before a cacher mentioned the sign. I went and looked and indeed the cache was about 20' past the old rusted overgrown sign. We pulled the brush back so the sign could be seen. I had gotten our city Park Superintendent's permission for the hide and had given his contact info to the Reviewer when I hid it, but I went back to the Superintendent and asked about the sign. He said don't worry about it, it was old and no longer enforced and was along what had become a well-traveled back-entrance footpath into the park that residents of the adjoining neighborhood used. The cache stayed in place for a couple of years, was found many times and I think two cachers mentioned that they would not go past the sign. Everyone else ignored it.

Recovering the body of a loved one to tell the story of their death and to be laid to rest can be important to the decedent's family, so for their family's sake I am glad that he was discovered. On the other hand it can be traumatic for the finder. I've found, or been with teams that found, four in my work with Search and Rescue, several more back when our REACT was active in responding to rural motor vehicle accidents before the days when police were cross-trained with basic EMS skills, and two that I just ran across... one while geocaching. At night. In a cemetery True story! One was an elderly man in a grocery store parking lot. He had loaded his groceries into his car, sat down in the drivers' seat, had his keys in his hand and died. We parked next to him and got out to go into the store and my then-12-year-old son said "Dad, I think there's something wrong with this man." Indeed there was. I was glad he didn't get the car started and die while driving down the road. The last was with a group of cachers, three carloads of us were spending a weekend caching around north Alabama and stopped for one on Saturday night that was in a small-town cemetery. HammerJane pointed out a drunk sleeping on a low stone wall behind some cedar trees near the cemetery's entrance. Something didn't look right to me, so I walked over to the sleeping man and discovered that he was in fact dead. From the clutter in the area it looked like he was an elderly homeless man who had been camped there for some time. We were competing in a national numbers competition called Cache League and didn't want to get tied up there so we found the cache and moved on without calling the police.

How is being FTF more expensive than, say, 20th to find? Because if it's cheaper to wait a while I can do that.

Between geocaching and regularly traveling to geocaching events all over the country gas was eating my budget up. Rising gas prices these last few years prompted me to trade my 8mpg Custom Dualie Suburban for a 16mpg Tahoe and then trade that for a 24mpg HHR. Of course by the time I bought the HHR my traveling had really slowed down and I could have afforded to keep the Suburban that I loved. Grrr.

Cool! It's pretty easy to figure out trade items to stock your caches or swag bag with... look at each item and ask yourself "Would I like this item well enough to trade something nice for it?" or "Would I want my kid to find this in a cache?"

The five I have hosted away from home, from a small BBQ at a lake 70 miles from home attended by about 30 to a 3-day weekend event 200 miles from home on the Gulf coast attended by several hundred have all been great hits and I've had a ball hosting them. The attendees seemed to like them too. Go for it!

It's pretty simple. Hide what you like to find. Trade even or trade up. This is not rocket surgery, folks.

I use the Groundspeak Android App (as well as all the others mentioned in this thread and some that are not) on my Motorola Atrix 4g. And I carry my Garmin GPSmap 62st. When the phone fails to get the job done (far too often) the 62st never lets me down. And, I suggest that describing this as a treasure hunt to kids sets up false expectations. I can think of lots of reasons why this is a fun game for kids, finding something that they will want to trade for would be pretty far down on the list. If you're going to bill it as a treasure hunt do what I do with my wife...you go find the caches first, make sure that they have good stuff in them and then take the kids to hunt them! My wife thinks all caches have great treasures in them because I have rarely taken her to one that didn't. I just don't tell her that I put it in there for her to find a few days ago!

No need to drag insulting the mods into this. There are some I know pretty well and consider friends who haven't hesitated to slap my hand or even issue a vacation when I got too far out there. This thread does seem to prove out the fears for what this community might become that this site's founder voiced years ago. Too bad.

Haven't seen anyone get a ticket, but I did witness 2 cachers crash their cars into one another (one stopped, the other slid into her) on an FTF chase. The cache published nearby during a dinner event, cell phone notifications started going off, folks started eyeballing each other, about 5 cachers broke for the door. It was a real Keystone Cops moment.

Home and feeling fine. Thanks to everyone for thinking of me and praying for me, it did make a difference. Now if someone would wade through and deal with the hundreds of emails that built up while I had no access!

Thanks for the wishes , kind words and prayers. Surgery postponped until Tuesday while they try to melt a pulmonary embolism.Doc says I need 6 by-passes. Doc says they normally take veins from the legs but since I only have one he,ll have to use cadavelr graft. Says he has an old Haition woman about to pass or an old pig on his farm that needs to be put down, so by Thursday I will be dancing to steel drums or rooting for truffles. C y'all on the trails.

Missing sections of walkway.

Go for it! Whoever said the final had to be one size or another was projecting his personal preference.

No, I will certainly try it. I guess my aversion to music that plays when a page is opened dates back to the days of .midi. Anyhoo, just a suggestion... let us decide if we want to listen to it.

http://www.geocachingpt.com/ takes me to the page in English, and immediately starts blaring music from an advertisement. Bummer. If I want to listen to an ad video I will click on it.

Especially if you're an Auburn fan.