Paul & Ros

Just a couple of ideas Why not drop it unactivated into a local cache and give someone a nice surprise when they find it. Or if you really want to make sure it does get activated - activate it yourself and then offer it for adoption via these forums.

OK, As if by magic after doing nothing for 30 minutes, the boxes have appeared in the listings

It is a long time since anyone posted to this thread but I came across it whilst releasing 5 Geocions simultaneously and wanting to include details of each coin on all the other coins pages. One of coins in question is http://www.geocaching.com/track/details.aspx?id=1959155 You can see the others via my proifile. If I go to edit the details I have put the following in the description field There are 5 coins in the series - each with the same mission, check out how they are doing below : <img src="http://img.geocaching.com/stats/tb.aspx?gu...39-31125293e7ba"> <img src="http://img.geocaching.com/stats/tb.aspx?gu...2f-99d8972f8d41"> <img src="http://img.geocaching.com/stats/tb.aspx?gu...b1-125b83a08fb5"> <img src="http://img.geocaching.com/stats/tb.aspx?gu...d87-7e881663b39"> <img src="http://img.geocaching.com/stats/tb.aspx?gu...62e-77791534d02"> Why does only one of these work, all 5 coins have been activated in exactly the same way, all have pictures etc. Very frustrating as I can see absolutely no difference between the 5 listings. Can anyone throw any light on this ?

We regularly drop bugs and coins we have collected whilst out and about into local caches we have already done and which we can get to within a few minutes of home (on an evening). Always try not to hang on to them too long but as stated by others work/life (and petrol prices !) stop us from travelling to new caching areas as often as we'd like so dropping them off close to home gets them back into circulation more quickly than they would. As for what to do if a TB/Coin is missing when you visit a cache - It depends how long it appears to have been missing for as to what I would do. A week or so may mean it has been picked up by someone on holiday and not logged yet so I would do nothing but possibly note in the log that I hadn't seen it. If it had been listed for months and there had been several other visitors to the cache in that time who had also said they'd not seen it then I would email the TB/Coin and Cache owner to suggest one of them moved it to an unknown location to prevent future finders from being disappointed. I have done this several times and the owners have always been happy to oblige. After all if it does ever turn up again it can always be grabbed back.

I have an Angel of the North to swap for a Clifton Bridge. That will give me a full set and once I have this they will all be released in the York area. Anyone want to trade ? (Got them last week travelling to Scotland. York Blacks, Carlisle Millets, Dundee Millets, Ayr Blacks, Ayr Millets, no problems obtaining in any of these stores but unable to get 5 different ones. All the staff were very helpful but some were still in the dark about the promotion. A couple of the Scottish staff were not happy that the coins only depicted England on the map and were all English sites)

I agree entirely with this approach. Maybe the cache owner likes the cache to be full of trackables to attract people to visit - fine if the trackables are his but if they were mine I would want them to move and I'm sure most other trackable owners would agree. If I see a coin or TB in a cache I usually pick it up regardless of whether I have another to drop, unless of course it has some mission statement attached that I can't fulful. If I have a TB or a coin I usually drop it off in the first suitable cache regardless of whether there is one already in there to swap it with. When does a Hotel become a Prison ? Keep em moving !

Crikey, thats an amazing total in such a short time. Question is - Can the cache hiders of the world keep up with your insatiable appetite for finding. 7 a day everyday, when do you find time to eat / sleep ?

I like it too but agree that it would be icing on the cake if the shading changed with the number of finds per county. Personally I don't see a problem with a "UK and Ireland" map with the counties of both included.

Anyone got an unactivated Big Ben to trade for an unactivated Stonehenge ?

Email sent .

Have you just stumbled upon yet another trackable item to add to the rapidly expanding list ? Geo Bags ? BTW the pictures have probably been doctored so that the code is not visible to stop people seeing the photos from logging a find. It does say "stamped" rather than "etched" though - Wonder if it might rub off ?

This distribution doesn't seem to have been handled very well by Garmin. It seems all it is achieving is to frustrate us geocachers and annoy the shop assistants in Blacks and Millets around the country who are being bombarded by our calls. "Get free stuff here !" does tend to do that to people. How many non geocachers are likely to have been 'converted' to the hobby and purchased a Garmin GPS on the back of this promotion ? Perhaps there should have been a minimum purchase requirement before you got a coin. For certain there should have been information given to the stores themselves in advance so they knew what was happening.

Suggest you speak to Staff member one next time, thats the story I got from Blacks at both York and Norwich this week when I visited. Still not managed to get my hands on a Big Ben coin to release, let alone any of the other designs , even after visiting every Millets and Blacks between York and Suffolk at the weekend. Anyone in Chester care to pop in to Millets on my behalf ? I'd send you an SAE and be very grateful. Pretty Please...

Travelled down to Suffolk at the weekend and decided to visit some Blacks and Millets stores along the way. Blank faces in Millets in Boston, Kings Lynn, Norwich (x 2) and Lowestoft. No one knew anything about the coins, infact no one appeared to have heard of geocaching. Blacks in Norwich were a different story, very knowledgeable and helpful staff but sadly still no coins. They are expecting more though - possibly on Thursday.

At a guess, I would say that London Eye will be out over the next couple of days, followed by Angel of the North a week later. Promotion runs August 7th to September 30th Big Ben - 7th August London Eye - 15th August Angel of the North - 22nd August Clifton Bridge - 28th August Stone Henge - 4th September Leaving just over 3 weeks for the promotion to run after all coins are released. This is all purely a guess, but it makes sense based on the dates they quoted. And as Midnight Ramblers said, the initials are very coincidental, so it's a possibility that may be the order they are releasing. It's the 15th today - any sign of a London Eye coin anywhere ? I guess the staff at Blacks might be starting to get annoyed at all the phone calls they are getting.

Maybe not monthly but might be interested in attending now and again.

Nice idea !

I agree with Haggis Hunter on this one. An early 2010 event in Harrogate would almost certainly put a lot of southern folk off a later event in Scotland because of the extra distance to travel. The novelty of the mega will wear off if too many are planned and the drop in numbers could put their mega staus at risk. Stick to one per year and let it move around providing there are enough volunteers willing to organise at different venues. That way those who like to travel get to see new places and those who don't might end up with a mega a little closer to home one year. Harrogate may be fairly central to the UK but it is still a long way from the corners !!

Bristol 2009 and Scotland 2010 both look good to me. Opposite ends of the country means that those travelling the furthest to one will find the other much closer to home. We are bang in the middle and would hope to visit both depending on dates. Good luck to those organising, The Harrogate event has set the bar high for you !!

Just got back after a few days away to find this thread. No coins left in any of the listed shops it would be sensible for me to drive to. Anyone got a spare ? It would get released !

Here are a few cache cam photos I've just got developed from the camera in my "Optical Storage" cache GCRAGK. Unfortunately only 5 shots came out as the camera got damp and siezed up.

There's our cache At The Royal, which can be seen in almost every episode of "The Royal" and a Harry Potter location on the North Yorks Moors Railway.

Thanks for the posts so far. I was looking at prices for P550 and P350 (plus sat nav software to run on them) when I saw the Garmin iQue 3000 for under £70. It looks like this comes with sat nav software out of the box and the Fugawi software I already have should run on it as it ran on my old palm M515. Only bit left to find is the "follow the arrow to the cache" software. Anyone else used this PDA to cache with ? I know the P550 is better but there is a big difference in cost here. This PDA is much cheaper, cheaper even than a direct replacement for my poor Geko. Should I bite the bullet and go for a Mio or will the iQue do what I need ?

Seem to remember talk of this being done once but way back before my time. I'm sure someone will tell.

For the last 3 years we have been happily caching using a Garmin Geko 201 plus an old Palm M515 with a GPS backpack fitted to it which I got cheap from that auction site. The Geko found the caches while the Palm ran Fugawi to help us navigate to the general area and Plucker to go paperless with the cache pages. We were very happy with this set up until this week when we had a double whammy of bad luck. The GPS add on for the Palm stopped working so fugawi is currently no more use to us than a paper OS map and today, whilst out caching, we managed to lose our Geko somewhere within just a few feet of here : http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_detai...c2-5ff920ae3414. So - It looks like we are going to have to invest in some new equipment and rather than just replace what we had it seems like a good time to try and get something which will do everything we need in one unit. As we have never had a tom tom style sat nav for the car it also seemed like a good idea to try and get something which would do non cache related navigation as well. Any ideas then for a single piece of kit (and any additional software) which will : Work as an in car sat nav for getting from A to B. Run Fugawi UK v2 (I think this runs on PPC as well as Palm). Run plucker or something similar enabling us to read gpx based files on the move. Work as a "follow the arrow" GPS to allow us to find caches. Not take forever and a day when switching between applications. Not fussed about it being brand new if something older and second hand will do the job. Any advice gladly received to enable us to get back up and running. Paul