Andromeda321

I've heard about it, but to large degree just have no idea how people find these archived virtuals in the first place. Personally I find it really hard to find the listings for old archived caches unless I'd found them in the past, which can be frustrating if you're trying to hide something and are just curious to see what's been hidden there in the past (particularly in high-Muggle areas where caches can go missing). In similar vein, I maintain several Earthcaches in remote locations and often get folks asking me if they can log them from their trips years ago as they have a photo at that spot. (I figure the allure of retroactively logging Laos or Tibet is also a big draw on these!) I always say no though because by definition you need to do other tasks to log an Earthcache, and you couldn't have done them before the Earthcache was placed there, and that does not seem fair to me. A few weeks ago I then had someone argue with this reasoning "but I asked a few reviewers and they said they wouldn't have a problem with such a request!" I kinda wanted to write back "tough $#!#!" because geez, who cares what they said? (Assuming they said that at all and he wasn't just making it up...)

Hi guys, checking in to this thread for an update! Went to Stockholm two weeks ago and holy hell guys, they have amazing geocaches there (and I even got to make an event and hang out with local cachers!). Sure I already had Sweden, but this was well worth it and I highly recommend Stockholm for anyone looking for a great town to cache in. Going to Norway in two weekends for four full days, flying in and out of Bergen (country #32!). Not really planning out the details yet because I want to play it by ear in terms of the weather, ie do the fjord tour etc on any days where it looks like it'll be exceptional. I did see that Earthcache hzoi and plan to do it! (And to be completely weird, I was going down a trip of memory lane so to speak and checked out geocaches at the summit of Mt Lemmon where I used to observe years ago... and recognized y'all in a log. So you have an official geo-stalker. ) Future trips confirmed: - Vienna for a weekend in early June with family- was just there in February, in Salzburg, but hey I've heard good things about Vienna and am looking forward to it! - Hungary for a weekend in June due to a cousin's wedding- not sure if caching will happen... - My big adventure this year is going to be Alaska and Canada for four weeks- fly into Vancouver to join my parents for a cruise up to Seward, then renting a car to explore the interior of Alaska and the Yukon for a few weeks. So I will get British Columbia, Alaska, and Yukon Territory this summer- not countries in their own right of course, but they'll fill up my US and Canada maps nicely and are surely filled with amazing geocaching! (Extra bonus, might be able to squeeze in an extended layover in Minneapolis on the way home to get Minnesota... depends on which day I decide to leave as the long layover is pricey on some days, and I am shelling plenty out of my wallet when in Alaska anyway.) Things I still want to do this year in countries I haven't been to yet, but still very much in the idle planning stage (and I'll probably only do two of): - Prague weekend- not sure when yet, but I have yet to get Czech Republic and reckon that's a good weekend if I want a getaway to see some pretty architecture and hang out in a backpacker's hostel this summer, in July perhaps - I noticed there are surprisingly cheap fares from here to Belgrade, Serbia of all places, which I don't know a thing about but hey, how bad can a place be for a weekend? (You can also go to Bucharest pretty cheap but I seriously have no interest in going there... same with Kiev these days!) - Still want to go to Krakow, Poland very badly, but know I will want more than a weekend there, so think I'll take off a day or two in the fall and finally go. - Also on the list is a weekend to Nice, France, as there are cheap fares there, and head on over to Monaco for a day trip. As a final thing, I find it kind of interesting nowadays to go back and see the number of caches I've found in a given country and how that relates to how much time I've spent there. I have 13 finds each in Iceland, Italy and Belgium, for example- only ever went to Iceland once but have been through the other two several times, so it's kinda fun to pause and think if that "makes sense" in terms of amount of time I spent there, and if it makes sense in comparison that I ended up finding 17 caches in Sweden. Yeah, I probably think about this too much.

Cool. But is it a picture you took? Do they have permission? If not, make them remove it. There are peoe who make their living by taking pictures- people using those without permission (let alone paying) is just a slap in the face. Haha breathe easy- it was a picture indeed that I took (well my brother took on my phone, same thing) and I posted to the geocaching section on Reddit (as you can see on the bottom of the image). When you post something there it becomes public domain. Funny thing is when I posted there several other folks commented their photos were included too that they'd posted at some point on Reddit. I'm not surprised the editor at Buzzfeed would go there to get good pictures so he wouldn't have to worry about permissions.

So saw this article on another geocaching forum from Buzzfeed, and clicked, and was gobsmacked to see my photo in it! My friends and I are the ones getting the big cache under the second point, "sometimes, they're easy to find..."

In my city, if it's more than 0.1 miles then I'm not walking. To be fair, the city I live in is Amsterdam, and that's because I'm hopping on my bicycle- everyone here is too lazy to walk when you can bike instead, conclude what you will. I also don't own a car, mind, so cycling several hours and many miles during a day of geocaching is pretty normal for me. If I'm not in the Netherlands, I've definitely gone a half mile "as the crow flies" for a geocache in some cities. Hiking is different though.

Back from Curacao- did some nice geocaching, both at the event and driving around the island for a day with my brother. Never did snag the Netherlands Antilles caches though unfortunately for one reason or another- mainly it being way too friggin' hot and clear that there are nonexistent paths that would require long pants and good footwear, and I had neither on at the time. But hey, very fun trip and loved the island and got a new one that's unusual only problem is it's too small to appear on the stats map! #geocachingproblems Norway is looking like it's going to happen next month which is great and I'm seriously looking forward to... have one other four day break next month due to the Dutch holiday schedule, which is looking like Stockholm more and more. Went over to Sweden for the day last year when in Copenhagen but that was more to say I had than anything, and I think Stockholm would be fun to see sometime! Plus the other option is Helsinki- a new country but I don't know if the city interests me enough for 4 nights. I may well do it so it's 2 days Helsinki/ 2 days Estonia- two countries!- but researching if that would be too big a hassle or not. Then unfortunately it turns out I have a Hungarian cousin getting married in the middle of a workshop I got money to attend in Boston, so that trip to the US is out. I'm also going there for Easter already actually, and I'm wondering what the odds are I could convince someone to roadtrip with me up to Slovakia to snag that country to make it more interesting on my end, but I need a better argument than "hey let's go to Slovakia briefly!" I think.

Checking in to mention I'm off to Curacao tomorrow! So will get that and Netherlands Antilles by the end of next week if all goes well. Doubt I'm going to Bonaire though as it's an extra flight (albeit super short one) and that would mean no diving the day prior which is the focus of the trip. Also slightly annoying, turns out my plane makes a brief stop on St Martin on the way there- like an hour-long layover, no caches near the airport even if it was enough time to leave. Ah well, I visited years ago as a kid, and look forward to the crazy landing at that airport! Looking ahead, planning for Norway for a few days in May so that'll be a good one to nab. My epic planned trip this summer is looking like Alaska and Yukon territory tho, so should get a new state and two Canadian provinces out of the deal but no new countries I think. I'm somehow ok with that. Probably gonna hit up a few more this year, just not sure where yet. Czech Republic at the very least I think!

Well kids, Bonaire is out (too difficult for my brother to fly there) so gonna base my diving trip in Curacao- and great news, it looks like I will get two countries on this trip! Why? Well it turns out up until 2010 there used to be a listing for the Netherlands Antilles which was a country consisting of all the Dutch islands in the Caribbean- this got dissolved at that time by the government, meaning new countries for us all to visit and log and such, but it does mean a few caches placed before 2010 have fallen through the cracks (example- http://coord.info/GCE189 ). Grandfathered in with inattentive COs I'm guessing- you can no longer "search by country" for them, they just pop up when you do a geographic search in an area. So hey, I guess I'll get to log a country that doesn't even exist anymore!

easyJet has no weight restriction because it really doesn't matter for their planes- one of the reasons the cheap in Europe budget airlines can be so cheap is they all operate only one type of airplane and that really cuts down on maintenance/training too, and the easyJet ones are fairly large. Regarding budget travel in Europe, the reason they work well and better than their ilk in the USA (so far) is you're only flying an hour or two max usually, and if you're only going for a weekend-length trip a small bag is all you need anyway. I don't really fly with ryanair as I think everyone in Europe is in a slightly abusive relationship with them ("I really should leave, but it was my fault they hurt me the last time so I'll go back and it'll be better!"), but more importantly they don't fly into Amsterdam due to airport taxes. (And Eindhoven, the Dutch budget airline airport, is far enough away it's not good for weekend trips.) easyJet does fly to Amsterdam and I like them, there's also a Dutch budget one, Transavia, that's not as cheap but pretty solid. Back on the original topic though, looks like I'm going to Bonaire in the end of March- another new country! Funny thing is the plane does a 90min stopover from Amsterdam to there, in Aruba, another country, but doesn't look like there's any airport caches there for me to get. As the primary motive of this trip is scuba diving it also looks unlikely I'll pick up Aruba or Curacao despite their being so nearby- looks like you need to fly, and a daytrip isn't possible as one then can't go diving the day prior. Ah well! Also, are y'all eyeing the "5 new countries" resolution in the latest Groundspeak newsletter?

I like the 5 countries one- someone at HQ has stumbled across the "collecting countries" thread! I guess the equivalent would be 5 states in the US.

I've not signed many a log cause I'm awful at remembering pens. I always reckon if the CO deletes the log because I didn't sign it I certainly won't complain, but then that's never happened. If you ever compare logs in caches to logs online, you'll notice a lot of folks don't really bother to sign the physical logs either. I always reckon geocaching is like golf, no point in cheating in a game you play against yourself. Obviously some will disagree and double-check their logs against online ones, but most people won't.

We currently have 1198 in our living country, and the remaining 1026 elsewhere. Note that not all of the 1198 were found when we were living here. Once we move only 156 will be local, and the rest abroad I currently reside in the Netherlands, and have 966 caches total but all of 226 of those are from that country. So all of 23% are from 'home'! Curiously the last place I resided before that, Ohio, had 267 cache finds (was also where I started caching), so as a general rule of thumb over half of my caches were found while traveling. Currently visiting family for the holiday, not visiting anyplace new but am 5 caches shy of 500 in the US so that's nice. (plus in the hunt for the #1000 but that is of course a topic for another thread) Mind I think a good way to tell if a person is a traveler (even in-country) is likely a correlation with how many virtual/Earthcaches they've found as a percentage of the total. As these caches are rare you usually have to travel further to find them, and they make up about 16% of my total for example.

This is also really close to where I since hid the Mosi-oa-Tunya earthcache- it's been very fun to maintain that page just because you can see how much the water indeed changes depending on the season. Funny how I don't have a find in Zimbabwe, but I do have a cache! (Same in Laos actually.) I remember when you had that cache published, just a short time after I was there. At the time there was the traditional cache on the Zim size (close to the Dr. LIvinstone statue) and a virtual on the Zambia side. Three was also a traditional in the town of Victoria Falls that had gone unfound for almost a year. I was with a group so I couldn't try for that one and I *think* it was found once then archived. Most of the caches in that area (and there aren't very many) are in ZImbabwe. I was staying in Zambia across the road from Mosi-oa Tunya National Park. Small world indeed. I actually maintain Earthcaches in Zimbabwe, Laos, Tibet, and Argentina- and have had some folks log them in more than one country (legit non-armchair folks). Really ought to invite those people to join this thread I think!

I've heard of these and have to ask why an event would be set up to re-occur in this way? I imagine there is a reason but i'm just not seeing it. The only thing i can think of is that it doesn't get posted as a new event and therefore doesn't send out notifications. Is it possible that the event organizer only wants certain people who know about the event to attend? Just curious is all,,, Honestly probably nothing more than just that's the way it's been set up originally so they keep doing it that way. That and the one I linked is by now historically the oldest-running event cache IRC, and was set up by a geocacher who died prematurely so I think they partly just keep it going in his memory.

I maintain a travel blog at www.whereisyvette.com. There is a geocaching tag on it too for all those posts in particular, but looking it over I haven't been using it much lately (can barely keep up with the travels alone usually, though I'm often finding a cache along the way!). To be fair looking it over, a lot of the pictures I use are for various virtuals. Like pretty much everything in Utah was an Earthcache because most of the major sites in Arches National Park and what not are.

This is also really close to where I since hid the Mosi-oa-Tunya earthcache- it's been very fun to maintain that page just because you can see how much the water indeed changes depending on the season. Funny how I don't have a find in Zimbabwe, but I do have a cache! (Same in Laos actually.)

20 in Europe is definitely impressive. I just got my 20th country total and that's includes 3 other continents. Of course, I don't live in Europe either. Is the train service as good in Montenegro/Croatia/Bosnia-Herzegovina as it is in other parts of Europe (excluding France...which always seems to be having a strike)? Not really, people tend to rely on buses there. Croatia has a network that goes down to Split, and you can go from Zagreb to Bosnia, but other than that the network was either never built or destroyed in the war.

I lived in NE Ohio for seven years and first started geocaching there. For those curious the caches logged so many times fall into two categories: 1) Monthly recurring event caches where instead of making a new event cache each month they've been using one and just changing the date/location as needed (example here). So this event I have logged several times because of the way it's set up- though it's annoying because I still get the announcements for this cache even though I moved away from the area nearly 3 years ago! 2) Basically creating a bunch of temporary caches for an event and logging them- this is how you can sometimes see people logging one event dozens or even hundreds of times. There used to be one annual event in an oval where people would walk around it and there were "caches" placed practically right next to each other, so you'd get 50 caches out of it... Never did that myself. Hope that helps shed a little light on it.

What my brother and I did that trip was enjoy the week in Croatia on the coast, and then went over to Montenegro for the day. I don't know how hung up you are on Montenegro specifically, but if you might consider a base in Dubrovnik you can easily do day trips there from Montenegro and to Bosnia (and there was a company that arranged onward travel via Albania to Corfu in Greece, even!). Bro and I also snagged a nice little apartment in the old city walls, recently renovated sure but in a nice old building. Recalling my brief time in Montenegro, yeah it's mainly going to be modern buildings as the Riviera there is being overrun by Russians and they're building like no tomorrow. Kotor was a nice old town though- maybe look and see if there is accommodation there. Bus travel in that part of the world btw was quite reliable and reasonably priced, so while you don't get the flexibility of a car rental I wouldn't discount it. Also in summertime note the border crossings in that part of the world can be absurdly long; the main Croatia-Montenegro one was 2 hours wait the day we went but luckily our guide knew a smaller one to take us to.

For the person who said Montenegro, was there last summer for a day and it's rather nice. For me, I'm traveling to the US for Christmas but nothing new/exotic visiting my family, then I have some ideas but haven't planned anything out in detail yet. I am rather excited that my freelance writing for science magazines mean that I made enough for a really sweet spring break though so I'm hoping to go scuba diving somewhere- Egypt might not be the best idea though, so I'm thinking of heading to Bonaire perhaps. Gotta figure out the details! For whatever reason next summer I'm dreaming about going to Alaska/Yukon for a few weeks- I figure I get one great adventure in before the thesis work really settles in. Not exotic for the country count, but certainly would be exotic. Also hoping next year to see if I can squeeze in Poland, Prague, and Norway for sure; there are a few other places I hope to visit but that map of Europe is already pretty well populated so they're usually in countries I've already cached in.

I agree that is plenty of time. My only visit to Denmark was a connection in Copenhagen on a flight from London to Dusseldorf! Not the most direct route; and there are many direct flights from London to Dusseldorf. But it just so happened that the cheapest flight on this date was this one via Copenhagen. And I found some caches. I had time not only for the closest ones but spent an hour or so walking (in the rain) to some others. I had a 3.5 hour layover. Getting through customs with a non-EU passport might take a little longer, but still you should be fine. Actually, you won't need to clear customs at all from Berlin to Reykjavik via Copenhagen. They're all in the Schengen zone. So hey, more time for caching! I think you definitely should be able to grab one of the airport caches in under an hour btw.

No, only two unfortunately. As soon as GS adds Sint Maarten and new caches are placed you would be able to grab 3 countries []. Looking at the map, Anguilla and St. Bart's are both their own countries. We went to St Martin when I was a kid on vacation, and I remember the ferry to Anguilla is like 20 minutes, and St Bart's is under an hour, so you could really get four countries on a trip with truly minimal effort in that part of the world. ... You know, writing that out, maybe I should plan my scuba diving holiday to St Martin?! I had a meeting today about a project that I may work on that would require a 3-5 day visit to Costa Rica. I've already found caches in Costa Rica but I've already looking at possible side trips or alternative cities I could fly into and take a short flight to/from San Jose. Awhile back I was looking at the logistics of going for Conch Shell Horn (I think it's the second oldest cache that has not yet been found). Flights to Aruba are about $150 less than to San Jose. If I took a side trip from Aruba to Trinidad and Tobago that would get me fairly close to the island where Conch Shell Horn is located. It would also add three countries to my list. Hmmm. Sorry but my first reaction there is wow, that sounds EXHAUSTING! Though if you missed it, after I wrote that last bit I checked and Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao all count as individual countries. So once one gets to Aruba you could hop around there pretty easily (doesn't seem like Venezuela is easy though).

You definitely should! Problem is I'm a solo traveler usually, so don't fancy going to places where you don't meet many others. That and I'm in Europe... but unfortunately the flights to where one typically goes diving here (Egypt) are suspended through January at least, and I don't think I'm so crazy to go a month or two after they start up again (even if I doubt anything revolutionary has been happening in Dahab). Looks like it's only 200 Euro more to fly to St Martin though thanks to the "it's still kinda Dutch" connection. This is getting more and more tempting...

No, only two unfortunately. As soon as GS adds Sint Maarten and new caches are placed you would be able to grab 3 countries []. Looking at the map, Anguilla and St. Bart's are both their own countries. We went to St Martin when I was a kid on vacation, and I remember the ferry to Anguilla is like 20 minutes, and St Bart's is under an hour, so you could really get four countries on a trip with truly minimal effort in that part of the world. ... You know, writing that out, maybe I should plan my scuba diving holiday to St Martin?!

Another one agreeing that Lisbon is a cool city- I was there for a weekend on a cheap fare. Though if I did that weekend again I'd base myself in Sintra instead- sooo many pretty castles! Regarding Copenhagen, 5 hours is definitely enough to get Denmark- train station is right at the airport and it's like 15min to the city center. Or maybe a half hour from Malmo, Sweden if you really just want the numbers (there's an Earthcache you can do on the train over that counts as Denmark!), but honestly I think Copenhagen is pretty enough it'd be a shame to not go and walk around a little. Also for the record I got my first Canary Islands cache today, here on an observing run and someone's hidden one right next to our observatory. Though it doesn't count as its own "country" despite being well over a thousand miles from Spain.