kelly@9

Personally, I understand why people do replicas, but the only thing that annoys me is when you can't tell they are replicas from looking at their page. I don't bother going to find replicas, but do go look for actual coins to log and move along (and don't log coins at events!). When I finally get around to putting my coins out travelling, they will not be replicas. However, it is quite likely they will be altered in some way to attach a goal tag and reduce collectibility.

Thanks... but this doesn't help me as I don't know if they're near where I'll be staying. It depends on what you mean by "close", but you're not just going to be walking down the street a block or two from your hotel and find caches (with the possible exception of virtual and webcam caches). Much of the green space in Washington, DC is managed by the National Park Service, so there aren't many physical caches in the typical urban green spaces like you'd find in many other cities. If you read the other thread that magellan315 posted, you'll note I listed several caches near downtown Metro stations in this post and then followed up with a few more further out in the suburbs if you had more time. If these don't give you enough, try from this point, although you'll notice the majority are going to be virtuals. It all depends on how far you're comfortable walking, but if you're willing to walk a couple miles, and/or take the Metro (subway) a few stops in the downtown area, you can find several physical caches and tons of virtual caches. If you have more specific questions, feel free to PM me.

Good call on the car. If you are staying in downtown DC, parking can be problematic, and you'd likely end up having to pay expensive rates to park at your hotel's garage. If you want to take the Metro just into Arlington, Virginia, you can find caches in near the Court House and Clarendon Metro stations on the Orange line, and they are close enough together that you could start at one, find the 3 or 4 caches along the way to the other, then ride back into town. Or as I mentioned before, find the caches over by Pentagon City on the Blue and Yellow lines as well. If you're willing to ride a bit further, the western leg of the Red line seems to have a few promising stops to walk to for more caches out in Maryland as well -- two in downtown Bethesda, 5 or 6 near Grosvenor-Strathmore, and a couple near White Flint and Rockville. If you did want to make the trek to the APE cache, it has been done by folks taking a taxi ride from the Shady Grove Metro station, where there is a pretty active taxi stand. (Just make sure the cabbie waits for you while you find the cache so you don't get trapped at the park! Wonder if Maryland cabbies can be hired by the hour like DC cabbies can, it might be your best bet...) Also, in case all my links were too subtle, I really like StationMasters online street maps near Metro stations. They also show small areas around the stations, and the distances on the map are all walkable (although the area may not be for some suburban stations!) If you combine the StationMasters maps + Google Earth with the 'Roads', 'Transit -- Local Rail', 'Transit -- Commuter Rail', and 'Railroads' layers enabled and the Geocaching Google Earth Network KML, you can get a good idea of caching possibilities accessible from Metrorail!

All the caches I listed in my earlier post should be in "safe" areas. I use quotes only because no area is truly safe, crime can happen anywhere, but statistically, you're not as likely to be a victim of crime in any of these areas as you are in some other DC neighborhoods. Although some of these caches are available 24 hours, many are available during daylight hours only, which further increases your safety when visiting. As for places to drop off lots of travel bugs... you can leave a few small ones in Pentagon City TB Motel (GCRCVZ), and The Silent City (GCQYTG) is another good one (but be sure to bring a printout of the cache page, it is a multi that requires computations based on formulas on the cache page + numbers off items in the area). If you have a car, of course lots of areas out in the suburbs are open to you as well. If you plan on visiting the Maryland APE cache (Mission 7: Crab Creek (Project APE) (GCEF7), it can hold a lot of travel bugs. Finally, I'm always open to answering any other questions geocachers have about visiting DC, whether geocaching-related or not. I grew up in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, and then moved back into the area about 6 years ago, spending 2 years in the Maryland suburbs and then the past 4 as a resident of Washington, DC itself. I'm still fairly new to geocaching, but I am one of the few cachers who actually lives in DC instead of MD or VA, and one of my goals over the next couple months is to find all the caches in Washington, DC.

Also note that if this "coin purse" is a cache with restrictive rules on "trading" geocoins, there is a faction here on these boards (myself included!) and among cachers in general that believes that geocache owners are not the ones who dictate how geocoins travel through their caches! So who does? The individual coin owners of course! So if you can help the geocoins along in their stated travel goals, you should take as many as you can help to move towards their goals! Repeat ad infinitum: "Activated travel bugs and trackable geocoins are not trade items."

Feel free to read any of these fine threads with opinions on the subject (or well, very closely related subjects) from the Travel Bug Forum, just mentally replace "travel bug" with "geocaching.com-trackable geocoin" when reading them: (1) (2) (3) (4)

Also do note that some people mistakenly believe that travel bugs should be "traded", so you should only take one from a cache if you leave another in its place. These people are wrong, ignore them. (If you're reading this and want to argue the point, go find me a rule or guideline somewhere that says so.) Do beware of taking too many travel bugs though, even if you think you can help them all in their goals (especially if they have generic goals like "visit as many caches as possible"), it is generally considered bad form to leave too many travel bugs in one place, since if a cache is muggled or otherwise goes missing, losing a bunch of travel bugs too just makes it hurt for all the bug owners as well as the cache owner. So if you take a bunch of bugs, you should be planning on visiting a bunch of caches to drop them off in the 2 week timeframe, not trying to drop like 10 in a single cache!

http://www.geocaching.com/about/termsofuse.aspx See section 7. This is assuming of course that the person is using your picture on geocaching.com. If not, Groundspeak isn't going to be able to help you. Also note that if you are not the copyright holder, but your friend who took the picture is, they will have to file the infringement claim.

Unless it says "Trackable on geocaching.com" or some other indication that it is a trackable coin with a tracking number, it should be treated like a trade item. If it is trackable, you log it like a travel bug here on geocaching.com, or similarly on other sites if it is trackable there.

Yes, I'd like to see some official clarification from Groundspeak on this as well. I'm guessing they don't want to get involved though, since travel bug owners have the ability to put rules on a per travel bug basis in their descriptions and such, and just the general feeling that there are sometimes too many rules. I don't have any TBs or geocoins out in the wild yet, but I have some almost ready to go. Believe you me, there will be lots of rules on my bugs and coins stating things like "This is not a trade item. You do not have to leave another travel bug in a cache in order to take this one, you just have to be able to move it further towards its goal in a timely fashion." Actually, I've been trying to come up with all the situations travel bug owners might want to impose rules on their bugs travels, and am curious if anyone else has gone through this thought process already. These are things to complement a bug's goals, not replace them. Things I've thought of so far: Please (do/do not) take to event caches. Please (do/do not) log without moving to another cache. Please (do/do not) 'dip' in other caches you visit before dropping this bug off in another cache. Please (do/do not) ignore any restrictive travel bug trading rules in travel bug hotels or other such caches. Please do not place in (easy/difficult) rated caches. Please (do/do not) place in puzzle/mystery caches. Please (do/do not) place in multi-caches. I'm sure there are plenty more as well as variations on the above...

Yep, you pretty much hit the nail on the head for one of my revisions on the new lists.

Hey all, as discussed in the most recent TB Hotel thread, I have a couple of bookmark lists which list travel bug prisons (1) (2), which I made both shared and public. These were of course controversial since the lists showed up on the cache pages for these caches, but that was pretty much the point. You can see some of the feelings people had by looking at the bookmark list ratings, some of which are predictably, not so nice. People also sent me a good amount of private messages about the lists, in about equal parts pointing out corrections or updates, letting me know about caches I missed adding to the lists, or demanding I remove their cache from my list. I tried to make the corrections and updates as quickly as I could and responded to the senders, thanked those offering additions and checking them out as my time permitted, and providing explanation for those who were upset so long as they remained civil about it. (Anyone who wasn't civil didn't get a response.) But now I think the time has come to take the lists and remove their public status so they no longer show up on cache pages. They will still be "shared", so you can access them using the links in this post if you find them useful, they just won't show up on the cache pages for the listed caches (nor will I be advertising them anywhere else besides this post). So anyway, the point of this post is just to head off any rumor mill that might start and give everyone the story straight from the horse's mouth. I chose to turn off the public nature of these lists on my own. I have my own reasons for doing so, and neither anyone from Groundspeak, nor any cache owner has convinced me to do so. (Despite lots of threats to "report me to Groundspeak", I never did hear from TPTB, I'm actually kinda bummed about that.) Part of my reason is the change to allow longer bookmark lists, since I can now have up to 500 caches on a list, I will be consolidating. The other reason is that I don't feel like the lists in their current incarnation are actually producing a positive change to eliminate restrictive travel bug trade rules on these caches. Even though several caches have removed their travel bug trade restrictions (or just clarified their cache descriptions since it wasn't their intention to have such rules anyway!) -- and then have been removed from the list -- I still think a honey over vinegar policy will work better. So stay tuned, I'm working on a revamped series of lists that will provide both the carrot and the stick, and hopefully provide a less emotional and more rational dialog about travel bug trading restrictions.

Now, I won't pretend to be an expert here, but I do wonder if some of the reason your particular coin isn't selling so well is that it is so personal. One side has your license plate w/ ham callsign, and the other your family crest. For people who know you well and want your coins, I'm guessing they will be trading with you for them. For people who don't know you at all, I'm guessing they wouldn't have any interest in a coin that is so personal. Especially since it doesn't have anything "cute" (ever notice how many coins have an animal on one side for instance?), nor anything "cool" or humorous, nor a caching-specific or nature scene (lots of these on other coins too) on it. So while I do think there is a glut of personal coins on the market that is slowing sales of all personal coins, I think your coin in particular might be moving slowly due to its extremely personal nature -- since your market for coin buyers is largely going to be people who know you by caching name & reputation, but not personally such that they'd arrange a trade with you instead.

I personally try to use RSS feeds as much as possible rather than email. If done right, I think they could be a very useful addition to gc.com. Now getting them "right" is definitely the key, and I think that would take a lot of thought as to the variety of feeds to generate, whether to allow personalized feeds per user, or some kind of parameterized system for fine-grained control instead, as well as a lot of other issues. The other problem of course is that if the RSS feeds update in (near) real-time, you would have to put in some kind of flood control, or else you just know some over-excited FTF hounds would be pounding the feeds every 30 seconds so they don't miss out, which quickly scales to a lot of load on the gc.com servers.

Try: Google search "giant microbes" (And yes, there is a TB one, but it is kinda blah.)

So I just received my CITO coins today, and I have to say, I really like them. At $6, I consider them an excellent value as well. One thing I like about them -- that a lot of other coins being minted right now don't do very well -- is their use of both painted areas and the bare metal areas for maximum effect. Thanks for the extremely readable tracking numbers as well!

Oops, missed this before... it's the DC Circulator bus service (PDF route map), but note that it really only covers a small area with the new route. If you're a geocacher used to going out hiking regularly, my guess is the only reason you'd consider taking it would be tired feet at the end of the day!

Also, please don't forget that there are actually some traditional caches in DC! They're not sitting on the Mall like many of the virtuals, but these two are just a short walk a few blocks off the Mall: Coconuts (GCKFCR) and Animal Crackers (GCKFX4). If you want caches that are bigger than micros, your closest bets are probably coming up past the Capitol into my neighborhood of Capitol Hill, where you can find Garfield Park (GCG6JX). (If you're willing to venture a bit further from the Mall, The Silent City (GCQYTG) is really an excellent and fun cache in a weird but neat place too!) All these caches are generally far enough away from the areas where there are security concerns, such that you should not attract attention from law enforcement (especially during daylight hours -- some are not accessible at night), but you should practice some stealth when looking for caches in any urban location of course (think muggles more than Officer Friendly!). There are also plenty of traditional caches in the city in more residential areas in Northwest DC, as well as nearby in suburban Virginia and Maryland. Many area caches are also accessible from the Metrorail (subway) system. For instance, Coconuts is close to L'Enfant Plaza station, Animal Crackers is close between both L'Enfant Plaza and Federal Center SW stations, Garfield Park is near Capitol South station, and The Silent City is near Potomac Ave. station. Just across the river in Arlington, Virginia, from the Pentagon City station, you can head to nearby caches Shopper's Refuge (GCQQDK) and Pentagon City TB Motel (GCRCVZ). (Note that the caches are within the areas shown on these little street maps surrounding Metrorail stations for all of these caches!) Hmmm... I'm thinking I need to put up a page with all this info and more about DC caching for visitors...

These look good, I'd buy 2.

Yeah, wow, the detail on these coins is amazing! This is by far the best looking geocoin I've seen.

Another site I'm on gives away a free month of their premium membership based on a combination of how long you've been a member and how active you are on the site, and doesn't publicize the fact that they do so nor any of the specifics. It seems to work well for them, and doesn't really let people game the system to abuse it. If Groundspeak was going to do something like this, I'd suggest they follow a similar routine.

I actually asked for this feature to be added to pocket queries for premium members awhile back in another thread which got no responses.

Yeah, this has bothered me too. It seems like it would be nice if the logic that generates the travel bug mapping KML files to something like the following: If 2 (or more) consecutive logs reference the same cache coordinates, remove all but 1 of them when generating the KML file, so each "stop" in the Google Earth map represents the location of a cache the bug visited, not one stop for "dropped into" and another for "retreived from".

As indicated in my bookmark list description, if you have suggested updates for my list, just contact me from the link there (which is really just a link to email me thru gc.com). Regardless of whether the cache description has been updated or whether I just screwed up, I'll review and remove if appropriate. (Or add if you send me new ones I have not found!) As was the case for Shebear's Lair, Shebear contacted me, I reread the cache description, saw no restrictive trading rules on it, and removed it right away. If it was my mistake for listing it in the first place, my apologies. If it was not the owner's intention to impose restrictive trading rules, but the original wording on the cache description was unclear, so they updated it and clarified that, thanks! My original Travel Bug Prisons list filled up, so there is now a second bookmark list, creatively entitled Travel Bug Prisons 2. If you find these lists useful, please feel free to rate them as useful. If you don't, you are of course welcome to rate them that was as well. If anything, the ratings give some feel for where the community stands on the issue anyway. (Also, sorry for making all the links in the bookmark list description be Metamark URL-shortened URL redirects, but the description is limited to 1KB, and I was well over the limit, so reducing all the URLs was the only way to get it under 1KB, since I'd already reduced the text to be about as brief and abbreviated as possible.)

Actually, I like Marky's idea... the only problem is that anyone can post a note to a TB without knowing the TB number, so not only could the organizers use 'Post a note' on the bug to give people info, but anyone else could too, knowing that 100+ people watching the bug would get the message...