AuntieWeasel

Pff! Reading the manual is cheating!

Also, having a large, serious-looking camera is a great cover for acting goofy in public.

Also, prepare to have your heart broken. Urban micros seldom have long lives. It's just the nature of the environment.

It's just on the puzzles and tricky hides. Hiders often take great sadistic pleasure in making you work those out for yourself. I have not, to my knowledge, EVER successfully solved a puzzle cache. Any puzzle caches in my history, you can be sure I was just the wheelman. Stick to tupperware in the woods, is my advice. If only I had some woods in my new neighborhood.

Depends on how important the photos are to you. I carry what was Nikon's entry-level DSLR -- the D-40 -- and I've beaten the heck out of it. It's taken tons of abuse and still gives me awesome pictures. I don't know what their entry-level model is now, but I bet it's splendid. The price of a good point and shoot and an entry-level DSLR are pretty close, or were when I was doing the mental math. And the latter is just going to be better -- you have to make quality sacrifices to get a slim profile camera body.

Cats. Cats make terrible caching buddies.

Heh. That's because it's a six-year-old thread resurrected from the grave. Look way up the top -- it's me, as a noob! Offering an opinion, just like a grownup!

I had to do a 24-hour urinalysis once. You know, where you save all your pee for analysis. They gave me a special bottle and everything. When I brought the sample in to the nurse, I remarked how difficult it was, because the opening on the jug was so small. She stood there holding it with this look on her face and says, "you weren't supposed to go directly into the jug." All I'm saying is, you can be pretty sure all these pee vandals are male.

Choose caches with hints, and read the hints. There are people who never use hints and don't approve of them. I am not one of those people.

Huh. Wow. A Google images search of "monkey butt" sure will put you off maraschino cherries.

My caching is all about the wow factor. I'll do guardrail micros if I'm caching with friends who enjoy that kind of thing, but not by choice. Part of the skill of the hunt for me is sifting the PQ to identify those caches that are going to give me the kind of experience I want: a great long walk, a beautiful location or, yes definitely, a spot with a bit of history. I don't suggest anyone play the game my way, but I have a feeling I'd love the OP's hides.

Pah! That's no fun! Me, I'd relog it with a nice, long log. ...about my first grade teacher, Mrs Talbot. Or my mother's recipe for three-cheese soufflé. Or that funny pain I get in my left hip when I sit cross-legged for a long time. Or...well, you get the idea. Honestly, you owe it to the larger society to mess with people like this.

I've only had one case of PI in my life, and it was some time after my 500th find, I think. More to the point, how many miles have you traveled tobogganing on your @ss?

Ah, but that's because you hid my favorite kinds of caches, BB. Writing a long log was like giving you a Scooby Snack -- good boy, hide some more!

One! And I was a noob. I developed a distaste for the Keystone Kops experience of stumbling around with a dozen other people after a FTF. Now I prefer to let other people troubleshoot the caching experience for me.

I usually write about the weather, or the trouble I had finding the cache, or any wildlife I saw (or wildlife poop, which you are far more likely to see), or any injuries, or...just anything. I tend to run off at the keyboard. If you have trouble thinking of things to write about, twitch, post a photo or two instead. That's always appreciated. Don't strain yourself trying to think of something clever to say about a roadside micro.

If you mean you were part of a team and your ex made off with your account, you could always go back and log the caches under your new name and back-date the logs. I would. If, on the other hand, you mean you did something that angered the Gods of Geocaching...you're on your own.

I did way above the averages at first. I think I found my first twenty. Then I got three DNF's in a row, which was such a shock to my system after such a great start, I sat down on a rock and considered quitting the game. My DNF rate leveled out at about 10%, though I found more when I was a noob out of sheer, bloody-minded refusal to give up. Now I'll give up cheerfully the moment I get bored. So many caches, so little time.

Quite. They're magnetic and tend to be stuck to things. Like huge suspension bridges. Ach! I'm getting flashbacks just thinking about it...

Oh, gosh, any number of things...from a film can to an Altoids tin. If it's a nano, it's probably a little pimple of metal about the size of a pencil eraser. Do yourself a favor: find some full-sized caches first.

I write long, chatty logs if I liked the cache. A paragraph or two. But my favorite caching is a long walk in the woods, so a longer log is appropriate. For a cache 'n' dash, I'd write a line or two, unless something interesting happened or the container was neat or something. If it's TFTC, it's a sure sign I hated the dang thing.

Ultra fine point arty drawing pens do a great job writing on wet logs. They're like tiny Sharpies. Oh, and Sharpie makes tiny Sharpies that work, too.

I had a cache in the woods near a teen hangout area. One day, found it emptied of everything but the log and the tupperware. So I re-stocked and left a note to the thief. Something like, "This is a geocache. If you leave the contents alone, this cache can stay and people will keep coming back and you can check out the changes. If it vanishes again, I'll move it to another part of the city." Nothing else ever went missing, that I'm aware. But reasoning with vandals probably doesn't work very often (I was just too lazy to want to move the hide).

Here's mine. Mine has very gratifying mileage, as I was doing a lot of trans-Atlantic trips for a while. It becomes a sort of caching diary. B'Deuce is right, though -- logging every little cache is a tremendous pain. I just do my favorite one of the day. And when I'm feeling particularly OCD, I go back and delete the pickups (or is it the dropoffs?), so I only have one log entry per caching day.

Big canvas shoulder bag. Okay, it's military surplus. I'm not very girly.