RockyRaab

Hmmmm.... What's the concensus on this: what if I had people go to the free website for my own book, and used parts of the free excerpt to form clues to find a cache? The cache would be otherwise unrelated to the book - and could be found without the clues. No one would be required or even asked to buy a copy (although they could do so from that site). Thoughts?

Not necessarily caching-related, but funny... "Now you sniff mine"

Here's an idea... I think a great alternative to wooden nickels would be those wooden "biscuits" they sell for joining planks. Buy 'em by the bag full at any home improvement place, then just rubber stamp them, paint them with acrylics or whatever.

I fear that even urban cachers may not long be safe from this menace. If the gardinels have adopted to attracting cache hunters in only five years (since caching began) then I am horrified to believe they will soon adapt to the whole caching spectrum. How long before they evolve (or be created/intelligently designed - take your pick) to appear as tall, thin, silver poles with swollen bases? Or long, thin, horizontal silver rails? Surely they will be attracted to the child/pet dense areas of mall or mart parking lots. "Just look under the skirt of that light post, sweetie. Sweetie?...SWEETIE!!" Horrors!

Our baby factory closed 30 years ago.... I'm 59. Can still do ALMOST everything I used to do, but these Utah mountains are a bit steeper than they were.

Got a Meridian Color for Christmas 2004 - with all the extras. Actually got it to find business addresses, but my daughter mentioned geocaching. Had never heard of it. Now use it 25X more for geocaching than business. See no reason to change or upgrade it.

If you added those words to your description, that might solve the dilemma. Those who wanted a tougher search could simply not decode the hint.

For me, a "Finally Found" is sometimes more maddening than a DNF - especially if there were several attempts. I went back at least three times over several months for my first nano (which was admittedly a devious hide besides being a nano) and when I finally did find it, I was almost peeved. All that effort for THIS?!? pretty much sums up my thoughts at the time. Other devious hides that resulted in DNFs rated a tip of my hat when I finally found them. Clever hides, well-camouflaged or unique containers all. On balance then, I'd rate DNFs as 50/50 prospects for the future.

Unless you have a very hidey-hole-rich environment, that might not work too well... Setting it up at dusk, when you can still see your chosen GZ but can also see your laser pointer spot, should be fairly easy. I suppose I was thinking a bit too locally. Here in Utah, we have rock fields that cover acres - that's a pretty hidey-hole-rich environment! I love your offset laser ploy, though!

All of mine are called "Czech's Cache (1, 2, 3, etc)" although I may start sub-titling some of them with added puns. I'm a second-generation Slovak, which explains why I'm never very popular when I travel: nobody likes an out-of-town Czech.

Now a writer - which is my fourth career (some of them overlapped).

Just a note to concur and add a little something. Your learning curve for the next few months will be very steep. You'll pick up on things in a big hurry, in other words. Every cache you find will amaze and delight you. And then, somewhere around 100 finds, you'll start to think "Ah. Another one of THOSE..." as you walk up to the coordinates - because you'll have seen several and you'll just KNOW where the cache will be and how it's hidden. (The UPS or Unnatural Pile of Stuff syndrome). You'll start to think of yourself as unfoolable. Then, one day, you'll walk up to a cache coordinate and think, "Ah. Another one of THOSE..." and you'll look where you know it'll be. You may even reach out your hand to grab it...but it won't be there. And you'll look and look and mumble to yourself and kick the dog, and it'll be just like that first cache again. Because the guy who hid it also knew what you know, and he hid the dangblasted thing in such a devious, such a clever, such a downright fiendish way that he teaches you a lesson in humility. And when you find THAT one - the fun starts all over again! Welcome to the addiction!

Lyfisin, it's a long-standing agreement (and it's even written somewhere in the geocaching code of conduct) that travel bugs are not to be considered or counted as trade items. First, trade items are essentially abandoned or donated property. Travel bugs remain the property of their owner forever. You can't trade someone else's property, but you can help in achieving the owner's goals for that TB. Second, TBs are trackable items (like geocoins) and as such are in a whole different category than trade items. Third, the entire rest of the geocaching community has agreed to handle TBs this way. You can take a TB or not. You can leave a TB or not. You can trade other items or not, but you cannot intermingle the two without essentially "stealing" one or the other.

We have a few of those nasty little magnetic nanos in this area - the ones not much bigger than an aspirin tablet. Instead of a log, most of them have just a code phrase inside. You email the code phrase to the cache owner in order to validate your "Found" log on the cache page. Personally, I hate the things. I'm not all that enraptured with film can hides, or keyholder hides, but I can understand them in public places. The smallest one that I'll hide is a matchsafe, and I'll only use that as a coords holder in a multi-stage. In my personal belief, if it isn't big enough for trade items, it isn't a "true" cache (in the Mountain Man sense of a cache being a hiding place for supplies and such). But I'm not agitating to have other types banned. As I say, they do have their place. Sorry for the "off-trail" rant. Must be geezerhood coming on...

Going back to the OP and the night cache... The first stage of the multi (hidden and listed conventionally) contains one of the mini-lasers and an instruction sheet. "Take this laser 25 feet north. You will find a small hidden tube. Activate the laser, insert it into the tube, and the laser will point to the final cache. Return the laser to this box for the next cacher." No excessive battery drain. No tricky on/off circuits and nothing to hide but a small, camo'ed tube that apparently belongs to nothing at all. Hide the final cache wherever the tube points, rather than trying to make the tube point at the cache. Day cache alternate: Instead of a laser, you use a screweye for one end of a "sight" and a painted stick or ribbon tied to a limb as the other "sight" with the cache aligned behind the stick. OR just rigidly mount a narrow tube to a tree/post. The cacher is directed (by the instruction sheet) to look through it to the cache - but which way?

"Mill Alight" gets the prize in my book. Fabulous.

Oh piffle. Go ahead and drill your hole. People are using hollowed out logs all the time, and those are just dead stumps no longer attached to dirt. Glue your bark to the lid and have at it.

There's a way to do this, but I'm not posting a drawing or anything. Hey, it was an idea, like "hide stuff in the woods." Cachers are clever enough to come up with infinite variations on a theme.

Hmmmm... Try this: Stage 1 - Coords lead to a hidden supply of dead golf balls. Note inside says "Carry one golf ball to (coords of stage two). Stage 2 - Insert golf ball into hidden tube. Weight of ball raises flag with coords to stage three, and also drops ball into storage container. Stage 3 - whatever you desire. Maintenance consists of retrieving balls from 2 and returning them to 1.

There's one near here (Ogden, Utah) that is a golf ball cemetery. I won't give the waypoint or what follows may be a spoiler. But it's a large white bucket, unpainted. There's a hole in the lid big enough to drop a golf ball in. To "log" the find, you sign the outside of the bucket with a felt tip tied to the handle. The owner empties the dead golf balls and/or replaces the bucket when there's no more log room. It's hidden...well, I'll just say "out of the weather" such that it doesn't get wet. Clever!

Wood gives you wind? Beans, sure; but wood? And I won't even touch the phone sax angle... Sorry, but you did start this with a smart-aleck reply (my favorite kind!)

Hmmmmm, lemme guess..."Worth thousands of dollars and contains shiny objects" The "geocache" will turn out to be a soggy cardboard box filled with school fund-raiser coupon books and a scratch-off lottery ticket.

I've posted this idea before, but will add it here, also. For my next cache hide, I plan to have the cache page hint be something like "Film can at N xx yyy.zzz, W aa bbb.ccc" At those coords (perhaps 100 feet or so from the real cache) I'll hide a film can with the actual hint inside it. THAT will be something like "Eye level hide" or "Red stone". The film can hint will be subtle enough that a muggle couldn't use it to go directly to the real cache. As the film can would not be an officially listed cache, it needn't be 528 feet away, and it would also serve as a "bonus" find for those who choose to find/use it. Come to think of it, hiding a film can hint might be one way to make a light post hide respectable!

In my seldom humble opinion, both your caching shirt and the plant shirts are commercially viable. You REALLY should offer them from a web site. Locate a nearby screen printer shop (there are gazillions of them in every phone book) and get set up with them on a "print on demand" basis. You might want to use your screen name as the "Copyright by..." name. Either work in the "Circle C" elgecko logo into the artwork itself, or print it in a reduced font in the lower-right corner of the art frame. I asume of course that the cocnept of making money is not distasteful to you

Just make sure a unit runs the Palm OS, which cachemate needs. The other system - Pocket PC - also runs some good caching programs, but not cachemate. Almost any but the very earliest units can be upgraded with downloadable OS updates. I bought a Palm 500 on eBay and it works perfectly with cachemate (and some other software that I also downloaded, such as FuelLog and some games) My unit is a factory reconditioned model, so it runs like new. The hardest thing for some people to learn with a PDA is the "graffitti" writing system. Everything else is a snap. Go for it and you won't look back.