Contagion

Thanks! THat's exactly what I was thinking of!

The plan isn't to spend a lot of time cacheing. We're driving pretty much straight through. I've heard that there are a lot of rest stop caches so I thought I might target just those and make them challanging by limiting ourselves to 10 minutes searching. It's a good excuse to stop and stretch your legs at many rest stops, but not spend a lot of time sidetracking off our route.

A long time friend of mine just got a job here and will be moving from Detroit to start work on the 11th of April. He offered to pay my airfair if I'd fly out and accompany him on the drive back. Sounds like a weekend adventure to me! I though I remembered a thread about caches on I-90 but when I searched for it I couldn't find it and I don't know if that only applied to the Washington portion of I-90 or if it was more exhaustive. But my general question would be how would I go about determining caches I can search for along a distributed route like 704 miles of I-90? Is there an easy method for this sort of thing? That also raised an interesting idea that I don't know if anybody had ever disscussed. Site support for Cache Collections. Basicly a bunch of caches that fit some theme, or route. "Some theme" is very vauge but that's cause it's only limited by the creativity of the collection creator. The collection itself could just be informative, or it could act as a virtual cache. As in... visit these caches and you tell ME what the common theme is. In my situation... somebody might go to the trouble of determining all the caches withing 1 mile of I-90 and then create a collection to group them together for others to reference. or you could make serveral collections, one for I-90 WA, one for I-90 ID, etc, etc. If the database is set up correctly you could even have a collection of collections. "I-90 All" All of this can already be done if you want to host your own little web page with links to geocaching.com. But if it were built into the system the page listing a collection could easily link to caches, show current status of active/inactive, reflect current difficulty ratings, etc. Essentially, you're just looking at two extra tables in the database. One to define a collection, and a cross table for the many:many relationship to the individual caches. Though, restraints on collection size might be a concern. Approval mechanisms are also something I'm not able to address since I don't really know what happens on that end. This isn't meant as a formal feature request just an idea I had that I thought I'd throw out to see what everybody thought.

That's a lot of batteries. Not sure if those are included, but it's something to consider due to the cost involved.

I don't even know the name of the little community I'm in. It's a no outlet neighborhood on 157th St off of 124th Ave. Just got there so still scoping out the caches in the area. Give me a shout sometime if you want some company on a hunt.

Yeah.. actually I felt a little silly since it was just a couple posts down and I saw it almost immediately after posting here. Doh!

Hmm... might be a race. I've already got one bug who wants to get to Germany and I JUST moved to a new house in Kingsgate and have been meaning to look for caches in the area. We'll see if I can get my GPSr back in time to get this one.

I've got a TB that needs to get to Germany but I've been stumped on how to help it get there. Should I move it eastward? or just move it closer to the airport?

I believe inter-island travel is only free for walk on passengers. I grew up on Lopez and have to admit that the number of times I took my car from Lopez to another island is amazingly few, and they do change policy now and again. But I'm pretty sure you still have to pay a fare for inter-island travel if you have a vehicle. Bikes, I'm not sure about. http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/ferries/ should have that info. For what it's worth, I think 2 of the 3 caches on Lopez are at Odlin park which is only a mile from the Ferry Landing. So if you were in a pinch for time, you could get off the ferry, look for those, then get right back on another ferry continuing West. Also, there's a very good chance I'll be hiding my first cache ever on Lopez sometime over the 4th of July weekend when I'm up there for a few days.

OH, I need to go find that one since it's really close to my place. Actually, looking at most of your caches, I'm convinced you must live somewhere near me. Funny how you can start guessing where people live by the clustering of the caches they hide.

That's HIGHLY probably considering we were looking for (what appears to be) a completely different geocache at the time. I could go back and update the inaccurate coordinates, but thought it might be weird to mess with somebody elses hide. And since I don't know what cache this really is, I'm not sure if it's supposed to have some simple offset math. (And by simple I of course me, highly unlikely, overly obvious, offset math.) I thought maybe what I found wasn't actually the first stage and that this multi actually started somewhere else entirely. That's why I was trying to track it down using the travel bug to see where it thought it lived. I'm hoping this is just a brand new cache and it was started with two travel bugs in it. I'll just keep an eye on the travel bug and caches in my area to see if this pops up. I did sign the log as "Contagion" so the owner may eventually go check it out and drop me a message. If nothing happens in a week or two I'll probably take the bug back so the owner can reclaim it since this one may never make it live due to proximity and/or erroneous coords. I'll still be first in the log book.

So.. I was out hunting today and took a friend and his wife along to introduce them to the whole concept. We were having a great time finding (and in most cases NOT finding) the caches we decided to look for. We were in a nice wooded park in the area failing to find our target cache and were about to leave when I noticed that there was another cache in that same park, so we might as well take a quick look for it. I tend to be a bit unorganized about this process so I didn't actually know what the details were, whether it was a multi/micro etc. I tend not to download any loc files for caches that require pre-solving of puzzles though. Anyway, while searching about the area we find the first (we assume) stage of a cache but the coords for the next step are somewhere in the middle of the pacific, so suddenly I'm not so sure I didn't accidently download a geocache that requires some offset information. Out of curiosity, I punch in W 122 instead of W 152, and lo and behold, that's .13 miles away. Off we go... We find the cache (YAY!) and inside are two travel bugs (a first for me!). I sign the log and notice that it's completely empty. My first assumption is that somebody just replaced the log. Maybe as it was full or damaged by rain. So, here I am at the website, going to log that I found the cache and took one of the two travel bugs. Hmm.. the description for the cache I THOUGHT I found kind of matches the obvious theme of the cache I found but not quite. It doesn't list any travelbugs being in the cache, but then again maybe they just weren't logged yet. Wait.. this cache container described isn't what we found. Maybe they just updated the container to be more waterproof? I know! I'll go look at the history of the travel bug to find out what cache it was in! "This travel bug hasn't been activated" So, at best guess, I've managed to stumble across a previously unfound, UNLOGGED geocache (I'm also a premium member so presumably I see all the possible caches?), and now I have a travel bug that also hasn't been activated. The question is.. what do I do with such a travel bug? Do I hold on to it for a week or two and check every couple of days to see if the owner registers this travel bug or the cache become live? Do I go back to this cache and put the bug back again? Am I aloud to claim "First Find" if I find the cache before it's live?

Grr.. no trasparent GIFs for avatars. Ah well.. such is life.

"Contagion" hmm... Did anybody here play TradeWars on dial up? Back in the late 80's, early 90's I guess. I had to have an ominious space piratey name for that game. It stuck. Been using it for email, online accounts and video games ever since.

Greetings and salutations! What better way to jump in to this thing than with a post on the eastside thread! Okay.. just let me catch up on the reading here so I can recognize the names.. Hmm.. 45 pages? Well.. my boss is on vaction, I didn't want to do any work today anyway. Helpful hint to other brand new hunters in the area... if you get lucky and find one of Beamin' Demon's hides, don't let it go to your head. Just pretend the others aren't near by until you've got some more hunting experience! EGADS!