chamois-shimi & special K

I think some guy by the name of gates might have something to do with that since microsoft owns bing. Oddly enough... but that doesn't explain why it won't show the cache on my iPod's Safari, when the link does just fine on my desktop pc. grump. (edited to rid post of smiley, a P is NOT a happy face!)

The new maps make my iTouch completely worthless for caching. Back to the ol' annoying prep work before setting out to cache days, yay. Not. There are things that would still make it work -- have the Bing birds-eye view images available the way the google satellite view was (I mean on the individual cache page, via the old "dynamic map" type thing, since the full-size all-caches maps don't load for BEANS), OR someone influential go pound on Google Earth's door and make them change the iPod app so it doesn't take input coordinates and transfer them to the nearest street address (USELESS!!!), OR someone make the Bing maps link from the cache page actually work on the iPod! It just defaults to someplace in Redmond, WA (hah hah) and doesn't show the cache it was linked from. Drives me nuts.

testing!

Odd that you should mention that - I was just looking for the link to her story about that trip. CrazyCaveLover's trip How far would we go? If there was an incredibly nifty cache associated with said coin, we'd probably travel several hours (one-way) - but that would be more to do the nifty cache with the coin as a nice bonus. Even then, we wouldn't take off in the middle of the night to look for it. Maybe a nice day trip on a weekend. -SK

As Jaybee mentions, the pink SAGA coin was created as a continuation of a running joke in Salem to gently rib geolite69. nmartin knows more about this than I do. All of these coins (10 of them?) are numbered 069 in his honor. The standard green SAGA coins are numbered sequentially. To return to the OP's comments about Oregon coins, there were yearly issues of the Oregon coin in 2003 and 2004 (that I know of) as well as a handful of local area coins. The Portland folks have a 2005 and a 2006 coin of which I am aware, the Eugene-area cachers put out an Emerald Valley Cachers coin in three metals at the end of 2005, and the SAGA folks of Salem put out their coin last year. There are also several cachers in the state who have personal coins - I've seen Go Jaybee's, Go-Mad-Cow, Jayel57, Arlsdaddy, nmartin (two varieties), Night_Hawk (many varieties), and pdxmarathonman that I can think of off the top of my head. I'm not familiar with other Oregon coins from outside of the Willamette Valley area. I also noticed that you were a fairly new Salem cacher. Welcome to the hobby! The website for the Salem group is www.oregonsaga.com -SK

Ditto!! We would LOVE that. Just today I was trying to figure out how to find an archived cache that used to be near one of my current caches - and without know who's placed it or found it, it's utterly impossible. It certainly slows down the 'cleaning up geotrash' (ie, cache leftovers) process considerably!

We would love to adopt this cache! It's a neat one.

Can we please please please have an option to use the old maps instead of the new Google maps? a ) They load SOOOOOOOOO SLOOOOOOOOOWLY on our dialup connection, it drives us insane. b ) Can't show archived caches, which we sometimes want to see. c ) Can't rid ourselves of found caches. d ) Can't rid ourselves of our own caches. e ) Can't see more than the cache name for more than one cache at a time on the page. f ) Can't get it to print properly. g ) Can't one-click directly to the cache's webpage. (see above about loading soooooo slooooooooowly)

"Alive" is an interesting word with regards to poison oak. The leaves turn bright red in the autumn, so it's a bit easier to see..... for awhile. Eventually it will lose its leaves. However, the oil that causes the rash can still be transferred from leafless poison oak sticks. That's why I usually get my worst cases in the winter and early spring - it hasn't leafed out yet so I don't realize what it is. So really, you can get a poison oak attack at any time during the year. I think I've personally had it in the Spring, Summer, and Winter. The red leaves help me avoid it in Autumn.

Seems like I get poison oak at least a couple of times each year while out geocaching. I'm a bit different than most in that the afflicted area weeps like crazy, but I virtually never itch. My current batch of oak (starting early this year!) has been around for about two and a half weeks. The weeping started about 1 week in and finally finished a few days ago. I've now reached the "bad sunburn" stage where the remanents of dead skin are starting to flake off. When the oozing gets particularly bad, we usually smear it with some hydrocortisone creme (chamois-shimi could tell you the exact stuff) and wrap it in gauze. If it's a large area, the gauze is then covered with an Ace bandage. For prevention, I've found that liberal washing of the area within the first 20-30 minutes usually does a decent job. As was mentioned by an earlier poster, once you pass that 20-30 minute window, it's too late. If I think I've been brushing through poison oak, everything I've been wearing (including jacket and shoes) goes straight into the washing machine when I get home. -SK

Just curious - was there supposed to be a response such as "got your pre-order request, thanks" to the pre-order we made? We never received one and wanted to be sure that we had been counted. Thanks much, -SK

Have to say that from an aesthetic point of view, I prefer the combined engine/tender coin, especially with the adjustment made in the last post. The amount of overhang, as others have mentioned, was the only real drawback from the original design. Glad that you liked my "Age of Steam" moniker. -SK

I guess it depends on how many coins you want to work on this year. I generally agree with SeabeckTribe. If the answer is four, I'd suggest a two-coin continuation of last year's series and begin with two from the "Age of Steam" - perhaps the engine and the passenger car since the designs you posted above are very stylish. You could then finish off the "Age of Steam" with two other cars (tender & caboose?) as well as work on cars #7 and #8 in your original series in 2008. Two AoS cars in the first half of the year and two original series cars in the last half of the year are also easier on the wallet than four cars all at one time. -SK

"First coin" seems to imply that if things work out, this series would continue. Any off-the-cuff thoughts as to how future organizations might be selected if this carries on? Really nice to see a coin supporting the local agencies that let us proceed with this pastime of chasing after little containers of plastic and metal. -SK

Good deal! We'll take one please. Thanks muchly!

I like that idea - one coin acts as a sort of pouch for the smaller coin. On a separate note, if you don't mind the combined coins taking up a big chunk of space, you could design a vertical slot into one coin, then slide the second coin through the first coin so that they would be perpendicular to each other. The second coin would probably need some kind of groove in the top and bottom edges so that it could "snap" into place. If it was done properly, the combined coins could probably stand up on their own since each is supporting the other. -SK

Right on!!

I'm certain there are rules about human remains travelling around (even as ashes!) but if you don't tell the authorities, I won't. I told K that I wanted my headstone to be hollow so a cache could be hidden inside it... he thought I was a little bit nuts, yes. Oh, well! c-s

I don't believe waymarks should count toward *cache* finds, but I would love to have both stats accessible on my gc.com stats page. Sort of like benchmarks.

Ditto that! I don't know if we'll ever get around to doing a whole lot of waymarkingish stuff (I expect we'll do some, just not scads), so it would be far more interesting to us to have our waymark stats listed on our geocaching profile, as a separate category. One that doesn't count toward number of cache finds, I would imagine. I do some profile-surfing now and then, looking for caches that people I know have been to, just out of curiosity and to look for the more interesting ones. Having the waymark stats linked through the GC profiles seems like it might generate a little bit more interest across the geocaching spectra. (Hey, what's that? An icon I don't have yet? MUST FIX THAT! Heheh.)

I can totally see the attraction of an all-automated category creation process... no waiting! Instant gratification! But I wouldn't want to see the Waymarking categories suddenly overwhelmed by endless variations on a theme (green rocks! red rocks! rocks on beaches! rocks in yards! boring rocks!), for one possibility. Also, the current lack of categories (there's really not that many) is kind of daunting to me- with so few examples, I'm not sure what to call a category. I have a virtual cache I tried to get approved (little knowing what was going on behind the scenes!) and so now I'd love to make it a waymarky thing instead, but there's no category it seems to fit into, and I'm not sure what category I'd WANT to fit it into. Maybe I just lack imagination.

I think that Jory-Ville: http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_detai...00-147772c8a869 ... could use a new caretaker. The owner hasn't logged into the website since July of 2003, and email bounces back as a nonexistent account. When we were out there this past weekend, it was rather visible, and there was moldy dog food, mustard packets, etc inside the cache. The container is also not as waterproof as it could be, anymore, and the TB that's listed as in it, hasn't been in it since sometime in 2003 (May, I think?). We cleaned it up and camoflaged it as best we could, and would be quite willing to adopt it and take over maintenance and all on a more formal basis. It's a nice spot.

Thanks!! Didn't want to make it too similar, that kinda thing. Now to just figure out... hmm.

South of Yachats, in Lane County. I think it might be in Carl Washburne State Park, but I'm not positive.

I can't find that anywhere on the geocaching.com maps- is it a paid member feature only? On cache maps all I can see are: Traditional Cache Multicache Event/CITO Cache Mystery Cache Letterbox Webcam Cache Virtual Cache Travel Bugs You Found/Own* New (last 7 days) and then Pan, Zoom, Zoom Out and Identify at the bottom- of which the only thing I can check is Identify. On regional maps, there's only Zoom In, Zoom Out, Pan and Identify. And Identify just gives current caches.