Alkhalikoi

I recognized a middle aged white guy is treated better than most, on average, by LEOs, but I take the following position toward this: even if you are worried about your rights -- as you should be -- when you are geocaching, you may well have put yourself in a spot where they've a colorable claim for "reasonable suspicion" to justify a Terry stop, at least if you are doing a lot of poking around a building or actual trespassing. A few kind words of explanation will probably solve any problem you are having, especially now that caching has been around for as long as it has and most LEOs know about it. That said, remember the important thing here: unless you are placed under arrest, you are free to leave. If an LEO is giving you a hard time and you are beginning to think you are being in a spot where you are being made uncomfortable, tell them politely that you are going to move on, and if they give you any grief just say "unless I am under arrest, I am going to leave." And just turn around and leave. (This wiki does a nice job of describing it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_stop) I've only had one interaction with a LEO and that was a couple of CHP officers when I was getting a cache very near the Bay Bridge. Drove up, asked what I was doing, said I was geocaching -- and he said, "Let me see what you found" (I had the blinky in my hand). Their reaction: "Cool, haven't seen one that small!"

I'll be just over 2,400 when I hit my seventh year anniversary in February, but I enjoy the quantification of my caching activity. I like going to baseball games, but I also like pouring over baseball statistics. One's derivative of the other, but both are enjoyable in their own way.

I had a low-volume caching year (sub 200), but still picked up eight new states and did a big chunk of California DeLorme (Golden State and SoCal), got a May 2000 cache, and generally had a good time despite the work schedule. I should be able to get at least two more states this year, maybe as many as five, this summer. With a bit of luck, I hope to add either the Bahamas or Turks and Caicos and maybe Canada as well.

At least they've stuck with "Taiwan", instead of the horrible affectation of "Chinese Taipei"

Mazel Tov! You look very happy (and very cold!)

Don't get me wrong: if I can avoid this, I will! If it were to happen, it would be in Abuja, not Lagos, and it would be under pretty good security conditions, but it's not really on my "bucket list"...

I love that geocaching creates these little micro-economies around distant caches. It was obviously substantial enough to change the view of the Nevada Department of Transportation re: ET Trail, and I imagine these are well-valued things in places like rural Brazil.

I don't mind the exceedingly hard caches to find (Everest, the space station, deep technical SCUBA caches), I think these can readily be found by people who are already engaging in an activity and thus can enhance the activity already undertaken. The ones I think are really silly is where the challenge necessarily requires that one devote an enormous amount of time to geocaching as an end in itself the stuff that's "888 Challenge ("8000 Finds, In Eight Different States, In Eight Different Years!")" -- No caches ought to be off limits simply because someone hasn't made caching their primary activity in life... but if someone's got $60MM to spend to go to the space station, and they can get the cache there? Go for it.

Although I've been to 19 countries (including North Korea! (well, the first ten feet of it, via the DMZ)) I have never been to Canada. I have three countries caching (US, South Korea and Costa Rica) I may finally have the opportunities to go to Canada on business pretty soon and trust I'll be able to sneak out to grab something in Toronto along the way. More interestingly, I may have the need to go to Nigeria in the coming year and there is at least one cache in Abuja I should be able to get without trouble. Hopefully the political situation will allow it (although my wife's not too thrilled with the idea. "Honey, the country is poised for a civil war and you have two school age children and the rebels tend to execute their prisoners." "But, honey, I can get a geocache there! In Africa! My caching buddies will be so jealous!"). I'm not sure my arguments are winning her over.

I got hit by a Riley1513 http://www.geocaching.com/profile/?guid=4b05d346-bb0a-4d40-93f4-fb37c910a049

I had some old coins of my grandfathers - thought I had sorted out the good stuff and using the dregs for trade stuff - fun but mostly worth a buck or two. I had one coin with me and left it in a cache - and went back later and looked it up and realized it was probably worth about 30-40 bucks! Oops. Hope the next fellow realized what he got!

The finds are, in many ways, incidental to the journey. One of the recurring themes -- perhaps the only recurring theme -- among geocachers I've heard in my 6+ years at this is "this took me someplace I never otherwise would have gone." A story about finding containers is fine. A story about that little lake that no one seems to know about even though it's five miles from an Interstate is better still. That's the draw.

The one thing that keeps me coming back to caching, despite occasional lulls in my interest, is that it gets you to places you'd never otherwise find. In this particular case, the schoolhouse where my grandmother first taught, in 1933-34. It's rarely the cache itself I much care for (though sometimes), but I sure like that it makes you take one road and not the other. Indian Valley Road * * * A year or so after my grandmother got her teaching certificate from San Francisco State, my grandmother accepted an offer to teach at the one-room, 15-or-so student school located on Indian Valley Road in southern Monterey County. Although she was later the librarian at both Lafayette Grammar School and Stanley Middle School in Lafayette, CA, the 1933-34 school year was the only year she taught.* Now, as it turns out, by the time my grandmother had moved to the Bradley-San Miguel metroplex, she and my grandfather were dating -- or he was courting her -- or whatever one did in the 1930s short of a proper but preordained engagement. I am sure as hell it was not “hanging out”, or whatever those crazy young people do today. He was friends from Berkeley High with her brother, although I don’t quite know the whole origin story. So while he worked as an apprentice printer in San Francisco, she was off in the southern Monterey County marches. And before the internet, before cheap phone calls, people actually wrote words on paper in such a way as to express thoughts and emotions. Nary an emoticon to be found. My sister (who owns the house in which our grandparents grew old together) recently uncovered an entire year’s worth of letters. I haven’t read through them yet, but I am assured that the bulk of the letter is my grandfather suggesting he should come for a visit and my grandmother accusing him of being “a devil” for his suggesting it. I don’t believe he came to visit. Of course, I’m sure grandpa would have had to sleep in someone else barn, because grandma lived with a Mr. Curtis, who was some sort of official with the school board and who owned much of the land there. Now, Grandma was a single lady of decent morals and, back then of course, the right thing to do was to board with a family of more tolerable morals (than what? Well, at least more tolerable than my grandfather’s devilish designs, thank you *very* much!). I now need to find out how the story ended. Will grandpa get to use his devlish charms on grandma? Will he leave a solid trade in San Francisco to win over grandma? Will Mr Curtis chase him down Indian Valley Creek with pitchfork and shotgun? (Yes, but not yet; not a chance, it was the Depression; and -- I sure hope so. Because that would be awesome. Stay tuned.) With all of this as background, about a month ago, my Dad and I scheduled a work meeting with some folks in Santa Barbara. My Dad thought it might be fun to visit her old school house -- something he hadn’t done since the summer of 1946, when they took their first vacation since the war. While my grandfather was in strategic industry (and then in his mid-thirties) he avoided service, there wasn’t a lot of time, money or gasoline for such an adventure. I had always thought grandma had taught in Coalinga, but it was indeed southern Monterey. Turned out the car broke down on that car trip and they stayed a couple of days in Coalinga getting the car fixed. So Dad tried to brute force his way through a map, trying to remember where it was. Remembering the road name, but little else. I pulled up streetview and starting working my way down the road. I barely had time to get frustrated with that sort of tediousness when I remembered my odious little hobby of geocaching and knew full well that if there was an old abandoned schoolhouse on a backroad in California, someone necessarily would have placed a cache there. Low and behold, there it was. We brought a stack of the old pictures from her year there (see attached) and were able to confirm that this was the right place. The clapboards were the right size, the window moldings a clear match. Unfortunately, the whole property was behind a locked fence, so we couldn’t get right up to it or make a clean overlay of the old pictures with the new ones, “Dear Photograph” style. It’s a stunning valley down there. Across the way is giant oak tree -- no doubt big enough to be the main climbing tree for the kids 80 years ago. We thought that perhaps we could find someone in the valley that knew a bit more about the school house. We found a sign that pointed to various families there in the Valley, including the Curtis family. Unlikely to be a coincidence. Most of the gates were locked but eventually we found one likely looking house. We knocked on the door and a friendly fellow came out and we chatted him up. He was new to the valley, so he didn’t have much to add, but suggested we try “Margolee” who ran the pick-your-own-fruit place down the road. “The valley historian and busy body -- she has a barbecue every spring and likes people to wear name tags with their license plate numbers on them, so she knows who’s coming and who’s going.” Unfortunately, we couldn’t find her, but we got the number from the fence. I suppose, from the fellow’s description, she may well know some of those kids in the pictures. We’ll be trying to run her down soon enough. Oh, the cache? Easy find. TFTC #2,112. * * *

Google Maps gives a 90 hour drive time (including ferries) for that route. I've found that for my level of geocaching on long trips (probably 2 per stop, stopping every hundred or so miles, plus grabbing caches near a gas station or food, as the need arises) a doubling of that gives some generous room. So maybe I'll think about stretching it to 17 or 18 days, buts you at about 10 hours a day -- but my guess is a a couple of those across the middle would just be big 12-14 hour days. (And I'd fly from San Francisco out to St John's, or up to BC and out from there -- I've found some places that will do one way car rentals from St John's to Montreal, others that will let you from Toronto to BC -- Montreal to Toronto must be pretty obvious) Thanks for the comments! Not quite sure when I'll do this, but I mean to.

I was thinking about this summer -- maybe next -- of geocaching from St John's, Newfoundland to Victoria, BC. I figure that, although I've been to 48 states and 19 countries, I have never set foot in the Great White North. So why not start seeing Canada by seeing a huge swath of Canada? Anyone done such a journey in one stretch? Figure I'd take about 10 days to do it.

I was out there this past April on a caching trip to get all 17 Nevada Counties. We ended up doing the first 25 caches, which was kind of fun. I admire those folks who do the whole thing, but the three of us were (a) en route to Vegas and ( laughing too hard to any more. We weren't swapping cache containers but our Door Closed-to-Door Closed time between caches seemed to be about 1m 5s -- that's 40 hours do to it all that absurd pace. But Nevada desert country is lovely. I hope you enjoy it.

While there are no "official" FTFs, but I think there's something akin to the common law that's developed over time. Of course, it took William Blackstone years to put together the Commentaries on the Laws of England, and I've got better things to do. But I bet, if you surveyed enough folks, you'd get a pretty good common understanding of what is and isn't an FTF for most people. You'll always get folks on the fora who say "FTF is a sidegame and therefore there are no rules that apply", but I think that's wrong. There are indeed rules. Just no one can yet agree on what they are.

I've been a moderately consistent cacher since I started in February '09, getting to 2200 caches in that time at a fairly steady pace. But this past year I probably 15 caches since September and nothing since mid-November. Too much work and family stuff and that I've picked off most of the close caches. But I doubt I'd ever not cache at all. The killer app of geocaching has always been that it encourages me to take the side road or go to a park I didn't know about. That remains my interest going forward. I'm off to Little Rock on business in a couple of weeks -- having lived there in 1997-98 -- and I'm taking half a day to drive down to Vicksburg, MS, to see where my g'g'grandfather fought with the 9th Connecticut. There is -- of course -- a cache right there at Grant's Canal. And I'll go to the birthplace of Muddy Waters in Roaring Fork, MS as well (where there's a cache). If caching is around in 2040, I'll still be doing it. Maybe just a few dozen a year, but it's been such a great new way to mark my travels. I can't imagine stopping altogether.

Awesome. My folks went there in 1998 on a trip and enjoyed it. Tea with the Governor General and all that! I've been fascinated with the place ever since the war -- when I was 12 -- and now with caching am trying to think of an excuse (and create a budget) that will let me get down there.

I am -- in fact -- a lawyer. And, look, you can always get sued. I assume that GS has general liability insurance to cover defense for this sort of nonsense. But, importantly, GS isn't a very ripe target. People sue where there's insurance and mostly not elsehwere. And you've got two likely defendants: the driver, of course. But even if you get past him, you've got the place that sold him alcohol, which is far more likely to carry insurance against this sort of risk. That GS's insurance doesn't cover it (let's assume that, although it's probably pretty darn broad), a plaintiff's lawyer mostly won't bother with it. Seriously, when's the last time you heard Major League Baseball or the NFL getting sued for a DUI on the way home? It happens, but it makes headlines when it does, because it's vanishingly rare. And those guys are only targets because they have very, very deep pockets. It's a distraction, sure. But for all the crazy lawsuits that do happen, the people that do get sued usually have *something* to do with the situation. GS suggesting people go by and have a pint isn't going to get them sued, even in the unlikely event someone later gets hurt.

Alamogul -- for now, anyway -- I just got a call from Lee this afternoon looking for a hint on a cache I'd found four months ago. The dude is a machine.

I was out on some levees in the south SF Bay a few months back -- not a high traffic area -- and I happened to look down and see a car key on the ground, slightly stuck in the mud but still pretty freshly left. I picked it up and put it on top of a nearby obvious sort of utility box that was low enough to the ground. About a mile and a half later, this guy comes jogging along from the other way looking worried. "Did you happen to see a key back there?" "Was it for an Audi?" "Yes!" "Today, sir, is your lucky day."

I have a rule set in mind for my own FTFs and I stick with that rule set. I suppose there are another 10 or so caches (beyond the 30 I count) where I could claim an FTF under a more lenient rule set, but I don't. Choose a criteria and work off of that. I'm hardly against claiming an FTF, but the most important thing IMHO is to judge them against the same rule set so you know why you claimed it years down the road.

I did the first 25 in April as part of a circumnavigation of Nevada. It was indeed fun, but I can't imagine doing even a hundred of those, let alone a thousand or more. Good luck! It can get mighty hot out there, so do be sure to drink a lot of water. Drive friendly.

Even if everyone "trades fairly" things degrade over time because whatever I value at 1x probably has a value to the next observer of between .75x to 1.25x. Eventually that's going to ratchet down to 0. Plus, with 3 times as many caches as 5 years ago, there's just a smaller overall supply of stuff to put into caches, so there's less good stuff in a given cache. I'll keep trying to put in good stuff, but I just don't think there's every going to a renaissance of good swag.