Candover

Seattle Bus Monster is handy for showing routes and finding nearby bus stops. It doesn't seem to have been updated in a while, but most of the routes inside Seattle should be unchanged.

Speedy! Weren't you still in the 800s at FEAR a little while ago? Must be the vest. Congratulations!

Sure you can. On any page of caches (such as newest hides in New York), there are size graphics underneath the difficulty and terrain ratings. = micro = small and so on... it also displays the size text if you hover your mouse pointer over the icon.

Yeah, I suppose I shouldn't really recommend that one for the out-of-towners, should I? (it's archived now anyhow) The man in purple reminds me of one more decent-sized container that I forgot: Peter Pan on the Upper East Side. Easily reached from the 86th St. stop on the 4/5/6 trains, even easier if you transfer to the M86 bus.

If it's a small TB (not too much larger than the tag), almost any cache will do. For heftier bugs, your options are more limited. Your best bet is Your Days Are Numbered, down on 20th St. It's not exactly in a tourist spot, but it isn't difficult to get there. You can do this one at night too. The only other two caches of any size that spring to mind are both up at the far north end of the island in Inwood Hill Park: Blue Sea and BCF-4 -- Inwood Hill. It'll take you longer to get there (try the 215th St. stop on the 1 train, or 207th St. on the A). Consider these if the weather's nice and you have the time. The park is large and somewhat isolated, so I wouldn't recommend these as night finds. (None of these are as big as a full-sized ammo can. I think they're all in the 1-quart range.)

Weirdest thing about the hunt this weekend: Fear, a NYC cache, now has more finders from San Diego than New York.

I kinda figured that was why this came up. In defense of my ill-omened little cache, I think Dan was on the receiving end of some particularly bad luck, but it wasn't from the local bums. (Though there's some signs of them if you keep heading north, I've never actually seen any unsavory characters down there... just guys from the neighborhood walking their dogs.) Beyond that... well, even if you didn't catch that it's in an abandoned section of the park from the description, you can't help but notice that when you start heading for it! Plenty of time to change your mind and turn back if you don't like the looks of it, same as you'd do if you were looking out across three hundred feet of thorns and poison ivy while wearing shorts. I'd imagine that works in general -- anything in a sketchy or isolated area is probably going to look, well, sketchy or isolated. (Not that safety isn't worth considering, of course! I intend to move Dry Bridge to a safer-looking area when I replace it, in the hopes that Dan's unfortunate encounter won't scare every potential future finder away.)

13 in New Jersey (10 of which meet the difficulty/terrain restrictions), 8 active on Long Island.

I'm not seeing any mention of a 10-mile-per-move limit in the rules. Is that restriction still on? ...and if not, can we place side bets on who'll be the first person to do the Montauk-Cape May trip in one run?

It all makes sense once you realize where the rules are coming from!

parkrrrr has found a way to convert a mapped route to a GPSr-readable format. Neat!

You can enter coordinates, as decimal degrees. Like this, for example. I'm told that adding a scale bar is already in the works.

I'd like to join, but unfortunately I'm one of those pesky non-car-owning NYC dwellers... and it's a loooong walk up from the city! There are some conveniently placed Metro-North stations on the east bank of the Hudson on the way to the bridge - is there any chance that someone passing that way might be willing to stop at one of them and give me a ride for the rest of the way? Hmm, though if that picture's any indication, I might not have a sufficiently elaborate hat to join along!