danewillow

I'll second that! Our trip to Maine this summer was made better by caching. We found trails we never would have known about if there hadn't been a cache on them. Cachers make excellent tour guides! Julie

Wow, you should follow me around to caches. Seems like all there ever is in the caches I find is kids toys and golf balls (old, torn up and nasty golf balls)! I personally like pocket lint, beer bottle caps, crumpled up stickers, soggy expired coupons. Basically anything you put in your pocket because you couldn't find a trash can. No wait, I'm confused. That's just what others think I would like to find. I like stuff for the outdoors: compass, small flashlight, etc. If I'm traveling I wouldn't mind finding a refrigerator magnet from the area. We collect those. Julie

This morning on my way to work I saw a large green ball of fire plummeting towards Earth (seriously). Was is caused by the solar flare? Was it an asteroid? Could it be aliens and if so, are they friendly or hostile? How will it affect my geo-caching?

"Seriously killed" as opposed to a more trivial death?

Another good invention... a flashlight. I've never done night caching but if you're caching at night, how do you find a box in the woods without a good light source??

I love how people justify driving an SUV. The family doesn't fit... My parents raised 4 of us and drove a Granada and a Horizon. I've crammed 6 people in a Chevy Nova (1980's Corolla type). Ok, 5 of them were drunk at the time but they still fit! Can't drive in snow, ice, etc.... I drove a rear-wheel drive Mustang during college. I'd drive home to Minneapolis and back to Fargo on glare ice with the freeway closing behind me and never went in the ditch. Passed many 4x4s in the ditch though! I even delivered pizzas with the car all winter one year. I've been driving Mazda Proteges for 10 years now in MN and the fact that they haven't been 4-wheel drive hasn't been an issue (the lack of ABS in the first one I had didn't help any on the greasy first snow a few years ago, 4x4 wouldn't have helped). Don't know if anyone has mentioned this or not but Ford Escape does come as a hybrid now.

I generally look in a cache before I jam my hand into it. I could poke my finger on a pin someone has put in there not knowing it was covered in flesh-eating bacteria! I guess as a kid I just witnessed the beginning of contaminated Halloween candy and cyanide laced Tylenol. I'm a little more cautious when reaching into the container that someone I don't know placed in the middle of nowhere and that has been visited by many other people I don't know. Put the arrowhead in there! We can only hope that natural selection will, via flesh-eating bacteria, weed out those who would sue you for their own stupidity. Julie

Danewillow from Ham Lake

Wind, even in a wooded area, can carry trash quite a ways. I wouldn't assume that trash there today was there yesterday no matter how old it looks. It's also possible they didn't see it, didn't have a trash bag on them, they were just stopping at the cache on their way through town and didn't have time to pick up trash someone else threw on the ground... Maybe if it is such a concern for you it would be a good idea to put a sign on or in the cache saying "Please CITO" to remind people to look around and pick up trash. You could also put some trash bags in you caches for those who don't have one.

No food in the caches!

Even if I knew how to post a picture in this reply, I'd have to attach too many pictures to include everyone: Maia (geo-pup) the Great Dane Titan the Olde English Bulldogge Max the Staffordshire Bull Terrier Ned, Louie, and Lizzie the cats Mango, Guinness, and Eris "Spaz-Girl" the ferrets Sweet Potato the hamster Einstein the Timneh African Grey Parrot Rosy the Rose-haired Tarantula Many fish Buried under all that fur... me and my husband.

We also have a Garmin Etrek Legend. It jumps around a lot when we get close to the coordinates. When we get down to around 20 feet we stop, look around. Usually we spot a hollow or fallen tree, pile of something. We're pretty new too. Our first few finds, we were crashing through the brush more than we needed to. We learned to stay on the trail and we usually find a better spot to get to the cache. Notice I said usually. We still find some that leave us wondering why the hider had to put the cache that far into the brush. I realize you have to hide them so nobody just stumbles onto them but nobody is going to stumble that far!

I hope they didn't live too far away, with the price of gas...

I wish you would all stop generalizing. I'm a newbie and I've never hidden a cache (I will once I find more to get good ideas) so apparently I've been just tossing the open cache with unzipped Ziplocs into puddles of water. Actually, from the very beginning, we have made sure that all the zips are zipped and the closures closed. We carefully place the container exactly (to the best of our abilities) where we found it and conceal it well. So you see, it is not about inexperience, it's about respecting the work of others. There are lazy slobs out there, experienced and new, who ruin the game for others. It doesn't just happen in Geocaching, take a look around you. See the trash on the ground next to a garbage can? Same lazy slob who tossed your open cache in the mud. It doesn't matter if they've hidden their own cache. They don't care about anybody but themselves anyway.

We were camping last year up in Ely, MN. My 'rents-in-law have a fiberglass camper as do we. There was another couple at the campground with a fg camper. We got to talking to them and they told us all about geocaching. My Valentine's Day gift was a GPSr!

I think if I came across a cache that had been emptied out by someone with a litter of kids, I would be disappointed. Not because I didn't get to take something. If I wanted a trinket, I'd go out and buy one myself. Three-fourths of the fun is finding the cache. The other quarter of the fun is in going through all the unique, cool, goofy items left in it whether it's a $10 bill, pocket lint, expired Sanka coupon, etc. It's something to do once you find the cache other than write in the logbook. Being fairly new myself, I would like it if someone told me if I were doing something wrong. I would have the same response- embarrassed and try to correct my mistake. To the lady who made the mistake- all forums are like this one. You just have to weed out the rude, hostile posts and pay attention to the ones that are informative.

We combined geocaching with travel and hiking. We saw some beautiful sights in Maine thanks to the caches. They led us down trails we wouldn't have found on our own. Maia the geocaching Great Dane puppy combines her hobby of stick chewing with geocaching.

I haven't been cache-finding for long (only found about a dozen) but I've discovered some important things to remember. Don't leave something that will get damaged when wet, easily broken (items get jostled around in those containers), crumpled, etc. A couple of the caches, we've found ourselves asking "Why would someone leave this?" My favorite was a Corona beer cap. So if it's something you normally would throw away, don't put it in a cache. I don't mind seeing the toys in the caches as long as that's not all that is in them. A few things we've taken: electrical tape (my husband needed some), dog treats for Maia the geocaching puppy, pocket knife, magnets. I like to try to find things to leave that will have some kind of use to the people finding it. I know I have enough clutter without going out and finding more. I haven't found any neat handmade things yet but if I get some, I might start a little display. We have a variety of stuff and bring a few things with us of different sizes and "value" and leave whatever is appropriate for what we take. Also, we take a look at what is in the cache and leave something different so the next person has some variety.

Way back when I got my first computer and had to come up with something unique for an email account, I had just gotten a Great Dane puppy. Her name was Shazam but I didn't like it. I had a hard time coming up with a new name until I was at work one day and came across paperwork for someone whose first name was Willow. The name fit her. I've used Danewillow ever since. Sadly, we had to put Willow to sleep last year because of bone cancer. We now have a new Great Dane puppy, Maia (Roman Goddess of Growth and she is living up to her name), who enjoys geocaching very much. Why do humans insist on walking so much when there are so many sticks to pick up and chew?

I wish we'd known the nickname before we camped there! It wasn't exactly the highlight of our trip out east. So that's where we left our cat! Just kitting! My guess is a squirrel someone caught in their house. They can chew through anything.

We recently visited Massachusetts' Massassoit State Park. We did some geocaching and, being new to this hobby, we hadn't heard of the CITO thing. There was trash everywhere! It's a beautiful state park but everywhere you go there is trash. Plastic bags, diapers, bottles, cans.... we even found a beer bottle cap in the cache. My message to people in and visiting Massachusetts: clean up after yourself!

I've also seen TFTH. Thanks for the hike??

We were driving through Wisconsin on our way home from vacation Monday and saw a black bear run across the road. It was the highlight of our long drive! I've seen them in the woods before. Never on the road.

As newbies to the geo-caching world, my husband and I were wondering what to put in the caches. I went to Target and went to the $1 section and found some really cool keychains I thought I wouldn't mind finding. After our first few caches we discovered that these were pretty good compared to what we were finding. Then we went to the $1 store. We picked up the following (each for a dollar, small enough for most caches): Mini radio, 2-pack of mini cards, flashlight, clip watch, a few other similar things. After doing a few more caches, we discovered that what we had was way better than most of what we found. And nothing cost us more than $1! We don't really care that there was nothing we wanted in most caches, we just left something behind anyway. We're just wondering why others can't do the same smart shopping we did? You've already spent the money on a GPS, can't you afford to spend another $1?