TimeTraveler09

Very cool design! I love Tolkien's books and world, and I very much enjoy the runic writing. The translation is "At last I opened my eyes and saw that treasure is found in the Earth, the mind, and the heart." I also really like Tolkien's quote "If more of us valued food and song and cheer above hoarded gold, the world would be a better place." I happen to really like the gold-on-red design with the purple border. I dark green border might be quite nice too, with mountains and the moon in white.

"It is better to keep quiet and look like a fool than to speak and remove all doubt."

I'm very partial to King Usery's Treasure (GC56D) just east of the Mesa area (about 45 minutes-1 hour east of "downtown" Phoenix). It's a cool hike up to a place known as the wind caves in Usery Mountain, then a short climb to the summit of the mountain to find the cache. Scenic views of the entire Valley of the Sun await when you reach this cache. The hike is somewhat strenuous, but a moderately fit cacher should be able to make it up and back without any difficulties. Hope you enjoy your time here in Arizona!

I'll say Chicago Bears over Detroit Lions, total points = 58

Steelers most, Cardinals least, total of 53

This was my log from GC1WFBH "Mars" in Mesa, Arizona. It's a tricky little 3-star micro geocache that took me three days to find. Why? Read the log: "Obviously, fellow astronauts, getting to Mars is no easy journey. I had my own epic adventure.... Starting from Earth on Wednesday, I had to avoid a car-shaped comet traveling the wrong way on the interstellar highway. Upon approaching the Martian orbit, I realized my mathematicians at NASA HQ had miscalculated the planet's trajectory, causing my DNF log as Mars remained elusive. Thursday, I recalculated the planet's wherabouts, but a minor meteor shower caused a flat tire on my rover, and I had to abort the mission to do repairs. Finally, with fresh treads and solid calculations, I finally found Mars without any further problems. "What a great adventure! And a really nice hide... well-camoflaged! Signed the Martian log scroll at 1020 hours. TFTC!" The CO liked my log, and emailed me about it the next day!

My old high school english teacher's favorite one-liner: "There are no new stories; only old ones retold." That's my third in the last few minutes. Good stuff so far from all!

"(Blank) is/are dumber than snot."

From college: "Bear in the Hallway!"

I'll tell you, when I first started (okay, so two months ago), I couldn't find the sun at high noon, let alone some of the caches that are around. Yours is not an uncommon problem. I found it helpful to think of three things when looking: 1. Are my coordinates ABSOLUTELY correct? Even a single mixed-up digit can be a difference of many feet, yards, or even miles. 2. What am I supposed to be looking for? If the instructions say it's a 1/1 micro near an electrical box in a neighborhood, I'll probably be looking for something small and magnetic that will stick to the box. If it's a tupperware-sized container, I'll be looking in bushes or behind rocks. If it's a large ammo can, I'll be checking only those places which could fit such an object. At the top of the page, it lists the difficulty and the size of the container - make sure you know what it is you're looking for (as much as possible, anyway). 3. Where would I hide something here if I were placing the cache? The best thing you can do is trust your "geosense" - that guiding inner principle which directs you to one place over another. Check unnatural looking piles of rock or brush or sticks, in bushes, under ledges, and on anything metal. Sometimes, though, you just have to take a chance and poke something that looks like it totally doesn't belong there. One cache I found early on took me over an hour to actually find, though I'd looked at it several times. It was a CACTUS out in the desert, and it blended in superbly! Finally, I just kind of kicked at it with my shoe, and to my surprise it tipped over! I still miss finding some caches here and there, but I've gotten much better very quickly, and you will too. The best bet, when all else fails, is to find some other local geocachers and go for a hike with them. They can totally show you the ropes! Good luck!

Couldn't tell ya... I try to move along everything I find! Good luck getting your TBs out the door (so to speak).

It seems like you would have to be some kind of computer whiz to solve this puzzle. I, unfortunately am not, and I can't spend all day reading "GIMP for Dummies" trying to figure out how to save, open, modify, and extract data from a 32x32 pixel icon....

Trying, yes, but I don't have access to what I need to solve the puzzle .

I know I'm mostly a newbie cacher, but honestly, how hard is it to at least send an email or post a note when you are going to be holding onto something longer than anticipated? I recently ended up grabbing a geocoin from a cache with the intent to move it along soon, but I decided to plan a trip soon after that, and waited about a month to release the coin in a much better cache farther away. Solution: posted a note on the GC page letting the owners know. They were appreciative and excited that their coin would be traveling to the Grand Canyon instead of some podunk cache here in the big city!

It's only 75 degrees outside in Phoenix today, I don't need to bring that much water.... Oh, what a cool little furry tree... (see: jumping cholla) It's too cold out for scorpions to be active yet.... The sunburn's not THAT bad.... (before having to see a doctor for the 2nd degree sunburn blisters) Why bring TWO pens? This one works fine.... Of course my hand will fit there.... This trail's not bad; an elevation climb of 800 feet is mostly flat, right...?

Well, my story's not nearly as cool (see: gruesome) as some of yours, but I was out hiking in the Superstition Mountains today and developed second degree sunburn on both my knees, which had been prevoiusly mildly sunburned at a spring training game I attended on Monday. Um, yeah, I think I am going to have to quit the long hikes for a few weeks until that heals. Being a white, white, ghost white kid in Phoenix, AZ sucks big time - I burn all the time! Got the only cache out there, though, so it was worth it!

I've been caching for 34 days now and I've got one FTF. I guess it's kind of cool as a cheap thrill because I live in an area where it's really hard to be FTF on anything because of the ratio of cachers to caches. If I see one I can get to, I'll try for it - why not? - and see if I can "beat out" the other few hundred people in the metropolitan area. Strangely, my one FTF came on a cache that had been active for 3 days in a busy area. I thought for sure someone else would have gotten it, but nope.

At a park cache sort of near my house out here in Mesa about 2 weeks ago, I was out caching a park at night because I'd failed to find the cache earlier in the day, gotten a hint, and decided I really needed to go back for the find. I parked in a spot where it was legal to be parked.... well, I think so anyway. While I'm out in the park making the find, a black-and-white cruiser pulls up behind my truck and starts shining their spotlight on my plates. They see no one is inside, the car's not stolen or anything, no tickets, and start shining the spotlight over the entire park looking for me. At this point, I'm walking back to the truck trying to figure out how best to explain geocaching to the cops. When I get about 10 feet away from my car, the cop car shuts off the spotlight, flicks on its red and blue lights, and TAKES OFF - FAST - down the road and around the corner. Weirdest cop behavior I ever saw, but I suppose they got called to a crime in progress somewhere else, and the kid walking in the park searching the bushes wasn't quite as exciting - or as illegal!

Accidents can happen even when one IS watching where they're going. Case-in-point: I was heading over to one cache location from another about .2 miles away, and as I was checking the directional arrow to make sure I was going the right way.... OOPS, I stepped on a metal sewer grating cover and my foot went right through! Luckily, I have good balance, and caught myself before I truly injured myself, but seriously, that was kind of scary!

I would probably choose GC1KM4H "Box o' Books." It's a regular-sized cache near Auckland's Pakuranga Heights district which also serves as a "Crossover" cache for another Geocaching-like sport called BookCrossing. The books in the cache serve as "travel bugs" - you register a book you are done with online, bring it to the cache, swap one book for another from the cache, read it, then move it on to another location. For the non-book person, there are also an assortment of items and a logbook in the cache for geocaching purposes. This cache combines my favorite activities of geocaching and reading. Also, I know this is different than many other cachers, but I do enjoy the "urban" caches because here in Arizona, USA, it's hard to find time to do others, and in the summers when it gets to be 120 degrees outside, it's nice to grab a quick couple caches outside an ice cream shop, then go in for a cool and tasty treat. This urban cache is a nice one because there are 32 other caches located within 2 miles of it. So it's perfect for a "numbers run" or a day of exploring the local businesses and amenities. Good luck choosing a cache to try to find. I've never been to New Zealand myself, though it's on my list of things to do. I've heard it's very beautiful, and like many of the other responders here, I would love to hike there someday! ~TimeTraveler09

Well, I doubt this will come anywhere close, but the first concert I ever attended was for Jason Mraz up at my college. I ended sitting like 100,000 miles away, but it was still a lot of fun. I had never heard his music before that, and I definitely got a CD later on because of it!

Sry - double post.

I'm a newbie when it comes to caching - I just found my first cache the other day, so I wasn't going to enter this race when I heard about it, but I will be following it throughout the next year and rooting for y'all (though I do have my favorites!)! Good luck, racers!

It would be fun to see the data collected on a program like this, but wouldn't the sample be skewed quite a bit by the (admittedly) several people who would not run your program on their computers?

Okay, that would definitely freak me out. I don't even like seeing that kind of stuff in the movies!