besem

My centroid's just moved into Chad. Not too long before it hits the Sahara!

I was minding my own business during the International Mathematical Olympiad in Madrid, Spain, when one of my friends back home in South Africa excitedly told me (via chat) that she had found her very first geocache! I, of course, had no clue. She sent me the URL, I checked out the website, and decided to create an account and to check it out. I was in luck - there were three caches listed within walking distance from our hotel. The only problem was... two of the three had cache listings in Spanish only! Oh dear... I put Google Translate to use, which gave me a paragraph which didn't make much sense, but I want looking anyway, to see if it makes more sense once I'm at the location. I found my first cache (the one with the listing in English only) after a rather long search. Of course, I had no clue back then. It was fun to try and retrieve the film cannister hidden in a very busy place like an uber-spy. Even put in a South African coin as trade item, before I knew that caches normally have trade items as well. I didn't manage to find the other two caches - the translation was simply too bad - but it got me hooked nonetheless. Back home in South Africa my caching took off, and now I boast with just over 300 finds to my name in just under 6 months.

Congrats to Urban Hunters - SA's newest kilocacher!

Stage one entered. Here we go!

Now this is tempting. I'll be in the Netherlands during that period. Could well organise a little detour into the UK...

CrystalFairy's South African Geocaching Statistics page also deserves a mention.

My improvised Bucket List is: 1.) Visit outer space 2.) Witness a total solar eclipse. 3.) Climb to the summit of Kilimanjaro. 4.) Live abroad, successfully. 5.) Become fluent in French and Xhosa.

Any hope of solving this without using a computer?

Yay! Something I know! Alpha Canis Majoris is also known as Sirius, the star with the lowest apparent magnitude as viewed from Earth (geek-speak for "the brightest star you can see, other than the sun").

A BIG congrats to Redglobe on 900! :applause:

That's pretty impressive! Where did you do all those multis?

Hahaha, that is brilliant! Good thing is, I'm expecting four new TBs to arrive sometime this week! I will post a link as soon as I tag & release the thing.

Nooooo! The reindeer in Stellenbosch was located close to where I lived... and *very* close to where I often took my telescope to go skywatching!

My GPSr has fallen a few times without consequence, but a few months ago, my GPS fell off the dashboard of my car, and hit that little metal thing you use to adjust your seat. Small little metal point = huge pressure, and the display was never the same again. The unit was still operable, however, and I cached a good month with it without any problems other than a wonky display. Then the display would get garbled, and only a whack would fix it. Later on I had to squeeze the GPS at the sides to get the display to be useable, and eventually, two weeks ago, during a hunt for that FTF, it died. Plugged the unit into my PC confirmed that it's not only the display. No life whatsoever. So I Googled a bit, found this site which shows you how to perform surgery on a Garmin eTrex. I didn't exactly have the right tools, but I figured I'd give it a go anyway. Let's just say that the operation was not a success. So what can I do with a broken GPSr? It's been a useful paperweight up to now, and makes my new GPS looks really great by comparison (GPSrs are WAY cheaper here in Europe). Maybe it could be handy as a frustration throw-thing, or possibly even a thief-decoy. Any other ideas?

I received my very first geocoin as a present from a Dutch cacher on Friday, for Sinterklaas! I released it over the weekend, it was picked up the same day and has no travelled a grand total of, dum dee dum, 31 kilometers! I can see how this can be addictive, but for me the fun'd be in the travelling the coins do, not collecting them myself. I'm planning to get a few more local coins to travel, and if I can get my hands on a micro coin, it would be awesome.

Any guesses where the third international one will be hidden? I'm putting my money on Canada, probably Vancouver. With one hidden in London already, I think I can forget about that Dutch reindeer. q:

I noticed that for most cachers, traditionals make up the dominating chunk of their finds. It seems that the worldwide average is aroud 80%, and 6% for Multis and Unknowns (if the data on itsnotaboutthenumbers are to be believed). So I was wondering what ranges of these percentages are, amongst cachers. How low does the traditionals percentage go, and correspondingly, what are the high ranges for multi and unknown caches? With the requirement of at least 50 finds. My personal stats at the moment are Traditionals: 62.0% Multis: 21.6% Unknown: 15.4% The main reason for the high Multi & Unknown ratios, is that these types of caches seem to be very popular in the Netherlands, where I've been caching for the past two months. They have some awesome Multis out here, and more than a handful of some really nasty puzzles! Nasty multis too... there's this one that takes you on a 40km round trip - by bicycle. I'll leave that one for when all the shorter multis and doable puzzles are all gone... which will be soon... muhahahaha. q:

I've been interested in getting a progressive track of the centroid of all my caches found for a while now, but didn't really know how to go about it until I found a centroid thread on the main Forum pages, which I posted to a day or two ago. What sparked the interest was my convoluted start to Geocaching - I heard about and found my first cache while on holiday in Spain. I then returned to my home in Stellenbosch, South Africa to find a few more caches, before going to the Gauteng province for two months to prepare for my study period in the Netherlands, which is where I currently am. The result is a path that starts off by making a loop through southern Africa, homing in on Pretoria and then shooting off across Africa towards the North. The odd thing is that technically, my "home coordinates" are still for Stellenbosch, and my cache centroid has never come closer than 500km to my home coordinates, and probably won't come near it for a long, long time. I return to South Africa in 2009, and by then I expect the centroid to hover around central Africa for the forseeable future. Have a look at the map here. It was plotted by taking the centroid of all my caches for every 10 caches I found. It crossed the equator a few days ago. yay!

I've been interested in getting a progressive track of the centroid of all my caches found for a while now, but didn't really know how to go about it until I found this thread. What sparked the interest was my convoluted start to Geocaching - I heard about and found my first cache while on holiday in Spain. I then returned to my home near Cape Town, South Africa to find a few more caches, before going to the Gauteng province for two months to prepare for my move to the Netherlands, where I currently am. The result is a path that starts off by making a loop through southern Africa, homing in on Pretoria and then shooting off across Africa towards the North. The odd thing is that technically, my "home coordinates" are still for my home in Stellenbosch, near Cape Town, and my cache centroid has never come closer than 500km to my home coordinates, and probably won't come near it for a long, long time. I return to South Africa in 2009, and by then I expect the centroid to hover around central Africa for the forseeable future. Have a look at the map here.