infiniteMPG

Thanks! Carved out the opening by hand... was a lot of work but worth it. One of the first people to find it wrote and said they couldn't find it so they sat down to think about where a full sized cache might be and actually found themselves sitting ON the camo stump without realizing it. I like reading stuff like that

I always thought "available in winter" was for any Florida cache located near an airport with direct connecting flights to Canada and the northeast during the colder monthes 15mph wind today giving us the wind chill factor temperature of 78F

Time to put my 2-cents in here and stop worrying about giving hides away as I hope the things I post are helpful in churning up the creative juices. This one I was pretty proud of and it's currently in the wild. Was looking at a preserve and found something that had potential, and by hand I made room for a full size Lock-n-Lock.... The raw state and how it looks in the wild (but it's in an area where it fits right in. This picture was in my yard). Then a little elbow grease and a sharp chisel to the bottom. And you end up with room for a full sized cache in my first 40-pound Lock-N-Lock. And hauling this camo to it's final resting spot wasn't the easiest of tasks, too. Didn't fit well in my pack

Agree 110%, as stated before wild feral hogs in Florida root untold thousands of acres to such a mess you can't even walk thru it. If anyone has seen freshly tilled and turned farm fields then that's what the hogs do... and they do it in preserves, state parks, county parks, along roadsides, across hiking and biking trails, and in some places so badly they make the land completely impassible. Might be a little spot here and there, might be completely across several acreas without a square inch untouched. The population has grown in Florida alone to over 500,000 wild feral hogs and reached the point where companies have sprung up with no other task then feral hog removal. Someone complaining about a few geocachers stepping on a palmetto that will probably be gone after the next controlled burn needs to step back and see what nature herself does to her own land. I think what geocachers do with CITO far outweighs the problems they cause... but we still need to encourage respect.

I have one like that here in Florida. Part is near a decorative waterfall at a big resort's entrance and someone posted a picture of Niagra Falls and posted : The Florida Falls - using our "Special" Lens. I laughed a lot with that one!

From an owner's point of view these lingering caches can cut off neat places to hide new caches, but then there are justifiable reasons, too. Had a cache disabled for over a year waiting for construction to finish on a bridge leading to the park it was hidden in. Others are disabled in areas where I still want to rehide something but haven't had the time. If someone complained or wanted the area to hide something I'd have no issue archiving and moving on. Plenty of places out there My issue is more with caches that are obviously missing and yet still sitting there active

Looked for a cache one time at a beautiful local preserve and came up empty. Started looking at the logs on my PDA and the last log stated something to the effect of "Cache was too far off trail so moved it to a more accessible location". Well... fine and dandy! And this was the final of a multi-cache so they couldn't post the new coords. De-de-deeee.... So I get a DNF because I have no clue where a "more accessible location" was and the owner goes out the next week and moves it back! Easy find after that. I agree to some extent of the potential impact to the environment that some caches can cause stomping down palmettos or tossing around ground clutter looking for the cache. But I think the total damage all the cachers in the state have done in the entire history of geocaching wouldn't even come close to what a family of wild hogs can do rooting around for a month.

I agree with a find is a find and as long as you found the cache, then it's a "find". Same scenario would hold true if you found a nano and the log was full. Can't sign it so would it be a DNF? No way! We were hiking a really remote preserve a few weeks ago and as with many areas around here there had been a brush fire. One hide was a waterproof match holder wired to a branch in a tree. The fire had burned hot enough to deform the container and melt the lid to the base. Could of gotten it open by crushing it with a rock (and would of done that had I had a replacement with me), but we just left it in place and snapped pictures of us with it. Entered a find even though couldn't sign the log. If that would of been deleted I'd of avoid that owner's caches but the owner appreciated the feedback and put it on their maintenace list (and disabled it until they could replace it). We had also found out of place and damaged caches of theirs along the way we replaced and repaired. Responsible caching. In a similar thing, I had stage 4 of a 5 stage multi (+11 mile hike) get fried the same way only it was a puddle of plastic, log and final coord marker totally gone. No one even attempted to log a find as it was stage 4 and not the final and I didn't want to get into any confrontation about that. Was out the same day and replaced the stage but you have to use common sense.... Oh yeah, laziness = DNF... any way you cut it.

Hmmmm, not an expert here but I always thought you're supposed to capitalize words referencing Jesus like Savior and Him.... Swag to me is fun for the kids so at times I don't see much use for it in difficult caches. A child who would like a trinket probably wouldn't be experiencing it in a 5/5 cache. And I agree 110% on the added weight. I think maybe swag should match swagee.... a difficult hike cache filled with camping toilet paper, bug spray, sun screen, bandaids, batteries and things like that makes more sense then filling it with plastic dollar store toy items.

Having cached in Florida in a lot of hidden away places I think the biggest scares have come from the element of surprise. All I pack is a nice Gerber knife and a hiking stick. Two days ago after work I was doing a solo mountain biking maintenance run 5 miles into a deep preserve. I was pedalling down an old trail with pines and palmettos on both sides when out of the silence, the area literally exploded with dozens of big wild hogs as they were rooting around just off the path. We scared the **** out of each other and luckily there was no collision as I had about 25 lbs of gear on my back. Have had that happen pretty often here. And when you're out in places like that alone and things like that happen, or you're trekking along and see big fresh panther tracks in the trail, it makes you wonder what the heck you are doing. But getting back is always a good feeling. I sometimes think that, even as foolish as this may sound, that element of danger is part of the fun of the adventure. Oh yeah, and I lost that nice Gerber knife from it's sheath once while I was literally running out of a freshly rooted up and heavily populated hog area and could hear them pretty close by... and I had to back track about a 1/2 mile right into the same place to retrieve it.... ::sigh::

Did it! Took out the blank lines and now the hints are on seperate lines. THANKS!!!!

GCT75R

The links I have that work are preceeded with : <a rel="nofollow" href= and followed by </a> Not sure if the rel="nofollow" helps but my html works fine like HERE

I have several multi-caches and put encoded hints for each stage on different lines that comes out on seperate lines when encoded such as : Cneg 1 – Gur ahzoref ner boivbhf ohg fvapr gur fvta vf snyyvat qbja, purpx jvgu gur ubefr evqre, uvxre naq ovxre. Cneg 2 – Fubeg phg ybt ng gur onfr bs n gnyy ohg sbezre srapr cbfg. Cneg 3 – Abg gur funecrfg penlba va gur onyy. Cneg 4 – TPI4A1, fubhyqa'g unir gb fnl zber! Cneg 5 – Bnx-ynubzn jurer gur uvxref fgnl arne gur sebaqf naq vg'f gur OVTTRFG bar nebhaq. But when you decode them they all CRAM together like this : Part 1 – The numbers are obvious but since the sign is falling down, check with the horse rider, hiker and biker. Part 2 – Short cut log at the base of a tall but former fence post. Part 3 – Not the sharpest crayon in the ball. Part 4 – GCV4N1, shouldn't have to say more! Part 5 – Oak-lahoma where the hikers stay near the fronds and it's the BIGGEST one around. Is there any way to retain the formatting/line breaks in a hint after it's been decoded??????

Never noticed that before but when I click on it, it launches Google Earth and then I get a message that states : Open of the file "<long file name here>" failed. Parse error at line 12, column 38: not well-formed (Invalid token) Does this work for you???

Yeah.... just was looking at my TRAVEL BUGS page and saw the coins were listed... Totally agree... TRACKABLES would beat TRAVEL BUGS for the titles since geocoins and travel bugs are uniquely different things in everything else.... Thanks

Does anyone know of any application, utility, or addon to Google Earth or something that can actually generate a track to map out where trackable items have visited? It would be totally cool to have a flat map of the world and have a track plotted out where a trackable item has been. Just dreaming... but thought I'd ask

When you're logged in to the GC website and you're looking at the My Account page, on the top buttons you have : Quick View | Watchlist | Geocaches (Mine) | Travel Bugs (Mine) | Benchmarks | Member Features | My Friends but nothing for geocoins? The only way I can find to view my OWN geocoins is to click on my profile, which takes me to the screen anyone else would see if they clicked on it, then click on trackables, then click on the geocoins, then click on the coin itself. Why is there only a viewing section for TB's and not geocoins on the My Account page?

What I'd like to see is a clean way to dump a PQ result into Google Maps so you can create your own Google Map of caches and have them viewable from anything with internet access. Right now I convert the results to a KML or KMZ and import and it fails only about 100% of the time stating it's an invalid KML (or KMZ) file. Even tried uploading to internet and providing URL and tried it with just a couple results and same thing... ::sigh::

A 5 year old running joke about a typ-O!!! Gotta love it!!!! I tried to pronounce CHINLDREN to a co-worker geocacher and I think I pulled a muscle! hehehehe

$1,000?.... good one! That would possibly cover the electric bill to run the servers to handle the accounts and data here 363 2/3 days a year (yeah, the occasional /server/ error occurs) There are always tweaks that can be done to make a website better, but all in all you can't beat GC.com.... except maybe with this site HERE...

I use a GPSr all the time but I have used it along side Google Earth and other applications that show me satellite images so we can pinpoint questionable locations. I can see how people could get by without one because when it comes right down to it you use your geosenses to actually find the cache, the GPSr (or whatever you use) only gets you close. And Google Earth won't have you following a little red arrow reading "150-feet this way..... 100-feet this way... 50-feet this way.... 10 feet this way.... WAIT!!! 95-feet over in this other direction??? HUH???"... hehehe

Having a bunch of hobbies/sports is what's expensive. I agree with Thistle Dew with photography. I was into 35mm but then went digital, got my Z3 for about $400. Thought that was rough but then stepped up to my A100 and that was around $750 for just the body. Then I added my new lens and that was more then my camera... so that tallies up to around $2,000. Then again got my biking (pedal power, not gas powered). Mountain bike around a grand each, road bike, about the same, then there's two of us, add in the helmets, CamelBacks, cleats, pants, shirts, gloves, tubes, pumps, and the racks for the Jeeps and it's more then photography! And then is our kayaking. Started with a couple of 'yaks for around a grand each. Then hers was too short for calm water, mine was too long for rivers... so add in two more at around the same cost. Then add in the paddles, PFD's, fishing gear, racks for the Jeeps, and dang, that's higher then biking!!! And then we weigh out geocaching.... hmmm... GPSr and.... ummmm.... errrr... well, that's about it. But wait!!! We geocache from the kayaks, and from the mountain bikes, and from the road bikes, and from the Jeeps, and I take pictures all the time while geocaching!!! Yeah, it is the most expensive. But well worth every penny!!!

I like the rating system of the link shown http://www.ratethiscache.com, really professional and nicely scaled, but it's outside the GC website meaning it probably won't get used much. In fact the list is pretty short on there when you consider there's over half a million caches. And none on the list from Florida.... ::sigh:: The ratings they use are : Overall Rating Container Rating Location Rating Hide Rating And all based on the 1-5 system. Works good enough for them to have an entire website based on it with caches from US, and other countries listed. Would be nice to have something like this tied inside the GC website. Also a weighed system might be better such as this (and just using the creativity scale as an example) : CREATIVITY RATING : If a cacher has 1,000 finds and they rate a cache's creativity a 4, and another cacher has 10 finds and they rate it a 2, the rating would be set by weighing the experience with the vote. 1000 FINDS X 4 = 4000 10 FINDS X 2 = 20 ---------------------------- RATING SUM TTL = 4020 DIVIDE BY WEIGHTED COUNT (1000 + 10) = 3.98 So even though someone rated the cache a 2, their lower find count only brought the rating of the cache down 0.02 points. You could tie into this experience level something like TTL FINDS + TTL HIDES or whatever you want to rank a cacher's experience level. But that way a cacher's experience would give them greater say so in the rating of a cache. Just an idea (I've got a million of 'em)

If the only thing we were rating was "how good was the cache?". I doubt all caches would fall in the medium range when you asked about things like creativity or kid friendly. I think you'd find just on those two counts a wide seperation between caches. You'd probably find more rated 1-2 or 4-5 and less rated in the 3 area.