[Ordering locations merely to give a bonus cache location on the last location causes needless driving and walking.]

On 7/16/2021 at 3:34 PM, Dr.Scissortail said:

My wife and I have completed 68 Als in 11 states. We plan to view many more. We have seen many interesting natural and historic sites and visited many lovely downtown areas that we would have passed by. However, there is one common issue that has prevented us from doing more and caused needless driving on some we completed. That issue is that about a third (no record kept) of the Als required a sequence or order when there was no apparent reason other than the owner wanted to put bonus cache coordinates on the last location. I understand that many labbers desperately want a bonus cache. A bonus cache is fine, but portions of the bonus cache coordinates can be placed in the journal for each location without requiring a sequence. Only one AL that I visited warranted an order to the locations. In that case, the historic sites were chronological. Even that is a weak reason [I understand that 1889 came before 1901] to require the labber to drive here and there, sometimes zig-zagging around the area and sometimes even requiring the labber to drive to the far end then backtrack. These are not the days for needless driving. I recommend that a statement be placed in the guidelines that indicate that bonus cache coordinates are not sufficient reason to require an order to the locations and that requiring an order should only be specified if it is essential to the AL theme. A similar statement should be placed in the AL template and perhaps even require the preparer to specify the reason for requiring an order.

The trick I've used to both put a bonus cache on an Adventure Lab and not make it sequential is letter the stages.  When each stage is completed the letter is coded to a number.  The GPS on the bonus lab is given by the letters that should have been revealed in the completion message of each Adventure Lab stage (and that bit can be referred back to later). I put a Geochecker on the Bonus Lab. 

 

When building an Adventure Lab the choice of sequential or not is a slider button, which I suspect defaults to sequential, I'm not sure as I built my last one a some months ago. 

 

Any additional instructions eat into the small fixed character allowance in each field (1028 in the description fields, 144 in the question field, 140 in the completion message), so when Adventure Labbers request for further details, the lack of information is a result of not having the characters to write much of anything at all.  The final completion message is fixed by Groundspeak. 

[New souvenir challenge: The Science of Discovery]

I'm another  geocacher who wasn't awarded all the souvenirs even though I scored over 300.   

 

We've been shielding for ever (daughter, not me) and the weather has not been the best for getting out on to the fields, but when it was announced we were having the big reopening on 19 July we reckoned that it was probably safer to go caching earlier rather than after the 19 July so we went out for a couple of days caching.  Up until that point we'd been finding anything new locally or when we were out for hospital appointments.   

 

We had collected the first souvenir in early June and by the end of 9 July, the first of the geocaching days out, we had collected the second souvenir and had found nearly enough geocaches for the third.  It tipped down on 10 July so we didn't get out again on 11 July when we followed a section of a local geo-art trail that I'd solved a while back.  On that trail we found 20 odd caches bringing our total on the Science of Discovery to more than 300 points, but as we were caching the page changed and the souvenirs disappeared entirely, so we weren't awarded either of the last two souvenirs.   I'm in the UK, we were caching early morning US time. 

[New here - Tips for Teaching Cub Scouts about geocaching?]

I am doing something similar with Girl Guides, but something I haven't seen mentioned above, is that the Geocaching Terms of Use, the ones we all blithely tick we've read, say:

Quote

Minors. Because of the nature of the game, which requires a cellular data plan or GPS device and the ability to travel to geocache locations, our services are not directed toward anyone under the age of 16. Although individuals under 16 are welcome to geocache, their parents or guardians must own and manage their accounts. You must be 18 or older to post in the Geocaching Forums.

 

which complicates the Girl Guiding Geocaching interest badge - Girl Guides are aged 10 to 14*.  The reasons I'm doing this with Girl Guides are partly because there's an interest badge and partly because we were given a trackable to return to some Girl Scouts in VA at an international camp in summer 2019. 

 

We (my daughter and I) set up some caches to teach the girls locally last October, planning to run a session in the autumn, but were locked down and back on Zoom before the session happened so everything was stalled.  I finally ran a geocaching session this month, a substitution as we couldn't do the mad outside games we had planned safely on wet grass, and that session had been planned and risk assessed and the caches were in place. In that session we managed to launch that trackable. finally, 2 years later.  The caches my daughter set up have been there for most of a year by now, and have been collected a fair bit, 62 finds on the one that I just checked, as easy starter caches for all the newbies during lockdowns.   I totally agree that the more interesting caches are more fun, but we all do start somewhere, and some easier starter caches are a good way to introduce geocaching.

 

To work with the girls and not expect them to have accounts, I set up an account in the name of the Guides group and let them take it in turns to log finds.  They did love it and I was asked if they could do it again.  As we had so few girls present as so many were isolating, I am planning another session as a voluntary badge session, to give those who missed the session a chance to experience geocaching, provide a second chance. At that session to allow them comply with the badge, we'll place a cache.   My plan is that when the inevitable happens and they move on, I'll adopt the cache and the trackable so that they do get maintained in the longer term.

 

* I am also taking this up with Girl Guiding as I am not sure that the person wrote their badge had much experience of geocaching; I am concerned about some of the requirements, after getting some 18 months of experience of geocaching myself [400+ finds (limited by shielding and lockdowns), 20+ hides and creation of a couple of Adventure labs]. 

[Formally reference Lab Cache Bonus in the Labs Builder and in the Labs App]

Is there any way of coding the Adventure Lab to link between the two?  I've added the  GC numbers of the Bonus Cache, but there's no html coding on the Adventure Labs to create a live link that I can see.  Am I missing something?