Hi Everyone.
Firstly, allow me to say hello, this is my first post on the forum!
I am fairly new to geo-caching, I started doing it as I thought it would be something I could do with my son. He is now a year and a half old so just getting into exploring... but now I'm not so sure if it is for us.
We found a geo-coin in cache near to us. Now, let me give you the scenario. My wife and I work very long hours (including weekends) so our opportunities to endeavour in hobbies are limited. I used to play lots of team sports but now I can't commit to regular training and games.... so, geo-caching seemed like an ideal hobby. I find I can print a load of pages off the internet, and stick them in my glove box of the car. Then, anytime I get a chance I can find them. No preparation required (well, apart from remembering to put batteries in my GPS!)
On one hunt a few months ago me and my son found a geo-coin in cache near to us. This wasn't mentioned on the sheet I printed out several weeks prior so it was a pleasant bonus. We had a holiday in Portugal coming up so I thought that would be brilliant to take the geo-coin to Portugal. When we got there we took some time out of our busy lying-by-the-pool-while-making-sure-our-son-doesn't-fall-into-the-aforementioned-pool schedule and went off and found a cache to drop off the geo-coin (which incidentally was named after major European City).
Inagine my surprise when I received this email from the geo-coin owner...
"Hi folks
I know you are relatively new to geocaching but am at a loss to understand why you took our Pra*** geocoin to Portugal when its mission is to travel around the UK. Perhaps you could help us by suggesting any other way that we could make this more obvious on the cache page or the attached tag? Fortunately, due to some more observant cachers, the coin is now on its way back home.
G****"
I've removed the guys name plus the name of the geo-coin. Incidentally there was no attached tag on the coin. Unless I had specifically sat down and reasearched the info on the coin I would never have known about the UK restriction
I'm a bit upset to say the least. I didn't realise geo-caching was so militant. I also thought the idea of these geo-coins and travel bugs was to set them off around the world. What if someone on holiday to the UK had found this geo-coin, does that mean they aren't allowed to take part in the fun?
Am I completely in the wrong here? Either way, I'm not interested in taking my son geo-caching if he's going to be subjected to this kind of harrassment in what i thought was supposed to be a friendly community
Thanks for your time.
John (& Seán - 18 months old)
