Alkhalikoi

I'm a great fan of buying blocks of hyperinflated currency (the Zimbabwe Dollar, the mid-1990s Yugoslav Dinar, the Vietnamese Dong (okay, not technically hyperinflated, just really a cheap nominal value) and leaving them around? What kid doesn't like finding a billion dollars or 500,000 Dinars or something. Sure, they'll be disappointed when they finally look up what it's worth, but for a few hours until they get home they can dream dreams of avarice.

I finished up early at an appointment and decided to grab a quick cache before heading home -- about 10AM or so -- and I pulled into this lot at a trail head and there's this guy in his car with this big old smile on his face just sitting there in his car. He looked over at me and just smiled even bigger. A moment later his lady friend popped her head and turned completely white with horror, then clocked the guy across his face. The guy and I started laughing but I just backed up and moved on.

Great work. A nice piece that helps make this thing of ours more accessible and fun!

I leave logs for two reasons. The first, is to share my experience grabbing the cache. It need not be some epic tale, but a few words are nice. But I also like to leave it as a diary to myself to remind me of my trip. So I often do a hybrid if I've gone on a big hike or trip, first, I cut-and-paste a paragraph or two describing the trip as a whole ("I hiked 10 miles and got 22 caches while out on a nice day..." etc.) and then some additional lines about the particular cache itself. Sure, some of these will be redundant to an owner who has put out several caches, but it seems to work and I've yet to hear any complaints.

I'm not quite sure what we'll call the UK (not very united, has a queen not a king) if Scotland secedes... no, my American cousins, sh*tty overcrowded island is not an acceptable title! If it's not Scottish, it's crap. So there you go.

I seriously doubt Alamogul is making anything up, doing throw-downs or anything else other than finding a whole lot of caches. I cache in the same general neighborhood as he does and I've probably run into him at caches more than anyone else. He's semi-retired and caching is what he does. No idea how he has the energy for it, but I have absolutely no reason to think he's anything other than legit.

אני תעליב את הרעיון הזה

Land use issues and access are indispensable -- sine non qua, if you will -- to the well-being of this thing of ours.

In 1983, the US Congress passed a law to allow for railroad rights-of-way to be repurposed as recreational trails. The point was, in part, to promote recreation. But more importantly, Congress wanted to preserve these contiguous rights-of-way because putting them back together would be impossible. It's almost guaranteed that if you cache in the US, you've cached on one of these rails-to-trails conversions. So I thought I'd pass along this interesting article in today's National Law Journal that goes to an interest side issue: are landowners entitled to compensation from the government for the rights-of-way being converted from rail easement to a trail easement. The answer is a rather resounding yes. When the railroads bought up easements, they only bought an easement for the use of the land as a train track, not a recreational opportunity, so their use has now been changed by the law. So now the federal government is getting sued here and there for takings, to the tune of up to $1M per mile. Now, I happen to think as a legal matter, the result is entirely correct -- the landowners, and their successors, never signed up to have a bike path in their backyard and the railroads didn't buy anything more than the right to run trails. Sure, bikes are less annoying that trains (although I prefer train enthusiasts!) but that's all the railroad got. And now it's been changed. But whatever your thoughts on this, I think it's important that we -- as geocachers -- really understand the land use issues at least as well as any other recreational interest group: bicyclists have a good command of this stuff and get taken very seriously at city council and planning commission meetings. Hopefully, this article will get you thinking about some of the underlying issues. (If there's interest, I'll try to flag these sorts of articles from time to time). http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNLJ.jsp?id=1202617646798&RailtoTrails_Program_Costly_to_Taxpayers

I'm sorry, the cache *reviewer* wants to wait 24 hours and then claim an FTF on his own hide? Whatever one thinks of FTFs, this seems a violation of the privileged status held by a volunteer reviewer.

I think this is delightful. I'll never do it all, but my wife and I have been contemplating a trip to Denmark one of these years (she's of Danish ancestry). I mostly want to go see the Lego factory, but this would add to my interest. A couple of days of a biking trip to get a chunk of this seems like great fun.

I will visit Hawai'i for you! Do you want to enjoy the beaches of Kauai, surf the north shore of Oahu, take a mule ride down the cliffs of Molokai? I WILL DO IT FOR YOU! Do you want to sip Mai Tais beside a pool, or spend hours reading an actual book? I WILL DO IT FOR YOU! Don't want to deal with the hassle of airport travel or the TSA? I WILL DO IT FOR YOU! Starts at $1.00, plus expenses and a moderate per diem, including documentation with photos or video. For price, email a detailed description of what you want along with a bank account number. No task is too large or small. WE WILL REMEMBER IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE! Satisfaction guaranteed.

Probably not. The numbers we were getting seemed organic until we got to about 100 or so. Now, not so much!

Thanks all. We've gone from 0% to 3% -- and yes, clearly there's a 'bot behind the biking thing.

East Bay Regional Parks (here in the East Bay of the SF Bay Area) is running a poll here (http://www.ebparks.org/activities) in the far right column which asks "what is your favorite outdoor activity?" -- EB Parks is pretty good to geocaching, but clearly some bike group has this poll tweaked in their favor at 70% or more in favor of biking. The poll doesn't ask "what do you use the EB Parks for?" so a little campaigning -- no matter where we find the vote -- seems okay in my book. http://www.ebparks.org/activities So if you have a sec, show your love! Thanks much!

I don't mind calling geocaching silly. It's a facially absurd thing to do. But -- to me -- that's its charm. I do this ridiculous thing and, in pursuing it, I can't begin to point to all its benefits: I have two kids, 9 and 5.5 who are reasonably competent hikers, I have new friends, I'm no doubt 20 pounds off from my pre-caching peak, I've seen trails and parks I doubt I'd ever seen. I hiked to the top of a mountain in Korea because I didn't not want to get some caches overseas. It's all for the best. All of it. But it's still a bit silly.

It's entirely true that English is the default language for international business. Put three people from three countries in a room and your best bet is English. But, here's the thing, geocaching isn't business. I found a couple of caches in Korea that had about a half-sentence English description attached to a paragraph of Hangul text. I figured it out. And it was part of the fun, all told.

There are 32 people who are known to have visited every county in the US. I'm at about 1200 from my travels, but I only started caching after I no longer had occasion to drive across the country very much, so I'm only at about 60 counties total (I'm in California, so they're cut a little bigger around here). http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/05/28/road-trip-completionist-meet-the-man-whos-been-to-every-county-in-the-u-s/

I tell my wife where I'm going, but I cache alone about 75% of the time. Sure, I *might* fall down a gully, but that's just not something I'm going to worry about too much. I keep an emergency blanket and extra water and food with me and, here in California anyway, don't worry about dying of exposure if I have to stay out overnight, but it's just a (very small) risk I'm happy to bear.

This was delightful! Thanks so much for letting us come along for the ride. Also, thank you for letting me know about Canadian Tire Money, something I'd never ever heard of!

Is there any way to readily merge bookmark lists? I have been planning a trip and, for simplicity's sake, I'd like to merge two lists I've created. I can do it with outside mechanisms, of course, but can it be done online?

I took my mother-in-law out with my kids to get a cache. Lovely woman, but a germophobe extrodinaire. There was small bottle of water in there, still fresh and (from the logs) left within the previous week or two. I grabbed the bottle and drank it down. She was completely mortified and blamed all my illnesses over the next year on this act.

For me it would be someplace I'd like to go even if I only found 1 cache. Tahiti would be nice. You are, as we said in my law school days, fighting the hypothetical. But, yes, I'd be up to a Tahiti trip and grab a cache or two on the way.

Given reasonable time and a large enough budget (and excluding going to the space station!), what's your idealized caching trip destination? For purposes of discussion, let's limit it to a single country or at least a single identifiable region. ("The Alps" is allowed; "Europe" is not; a "Baltic Cruise" would be okay, "round the world cruise" would not). For me -- and we may do this next summer -- is taking the whole family to do the entire ring road of Iceland, maybe taking about 12 days to do it. The more specific, the better.

It's sort of frustrating that I found caching so late - 2009. My wife and I got married in 2001 and certainly would have gotten caches in in England, Scotland and Australia -- and she solo in Japan -- since then. I've been to about 18 countries and 46 states, but have only found caches in 3 countries and 9 states. I'll pick up four more states - WY, CO, NE and UT - in July when I take my son on our annual baseball/caching trip.