tallglenn

...but you are able to make 7900 timely posts to the forum? Many of us have health issues that affect our geocaching - at face value yours seems to be more of a "priorities" issue? Does this issue of not logging online in a timely manner bother you? If so, maybe I understand your health issue that is effecting your geocaching. If you are replying to me, then no, you do not understand my health issue.

...but you are able to make 7900 timely posts to the forum? Many of us have health issues that affect our geocaching - at face value yours seems to be more of a "priorities" issue?

I wouldn't ignore DNFs. I would put them on the watchlist to see when someone else finds them or maintains them. When I first started, I had to go back to the same places again and again until I found them. Sometimes they aren't there for you to find, but most times you just need to look again. If you DNF in the morning, try looking in the evening sun. Expand your search 30 feet or so. If you've been looking low, look high. Don't give up on them.

Your post got me thinking about why some of us see "outdoors" as a calm, wide open space to escape. I grew up with three siblings. At one time I shared a bedroom with my two little sisters. Home was chaos, messiness and chores. We would come home from school, watch Gilligan or the Brady Bunch in their perfect house while eating a bowl of cereal, and ride our bikes around until dad got home. After dinner we were outta there again until the sun started to set. We had a little creek behind our house where we "observed nature" unsupervised and free. Today kids don't have yards, except the 6' of chemical laden manicured space between neighbors. Their parents are afraid to let them go out on their own. How do they ever escape monotony or annoyances? Much safer to stay inside and play video games. Nature must be so big, scary and random to them. Our first house in Florida was less than 1/2 mile from a nature preserve surrounded by residential areas. Any time we went there, we had the whole place to ourselves. People just didn't go there. Too busy for a relaxing walk? I guess it's difficult to schedule down-time. Sorry for the randomness, but if you saw a couple kids playing at the edge of a pond with an alligator warning sign posted, would you yell at them to get out of there? So many things we did as kids aren't allowed any more. There are so many no-no signs you feel like anywhere you go or anything you do is "bad". So thanks for your interest in getting people "out there".

I'm confused - are the chess pieces trackables (which are generally meant to keep moving) or gifts (for people to keep)? Last I checked, a Travel Bug tag cost around $15 each. Perhaps they are unactivated trackables that you are giving away? Either way, I doubt that one person would be able to end up with ALL of them! No doubt some of them would travel to different states and countries. Trackables are also notorious for getting lost. I would love to see a photo of your handmade chessboard - maybe you could post a picture with each chess piece.

Really? Did you want them to change it to a weekend in July? Souvenirs discriminate??? I hope you were being sarcastic, because I am LMAO.

Oh, I like that - but I have sworn off smartphones.

Solicitation and Commercial Content • Geocaches do not solicit for any purpose. Cache listings perceived to be posted for religious, political, charitable or social agendas are not permitted. Geocaching is intended to be an enjoyable, family-friendly hobby, not a platform for an agenda. Cache pages cannot require, and should not strongly encourage, the placement of new caches. This is considered an agenda and the listing will not be publishable. • Commercial geocaches are disallowed. Cache listings perceived as commercial will not be published. A commercial cache listing has one or more of the following characteristics: 1.It has overtones of advertising, marketing or promotion. 2.It suggests or requires that the finder go inside a business, interact with employees and/or purchase a product or service. 3.It contains links to businesses, agencies, commercial advertisers, charities, or political or social agendas. 4.It contains the logo of a business or organization, including non-profit organizations. 5.It contains the name of a business or commercial product.

I've seen it done many times but you can't get too "commercial". You aren't allowed to force people to buy something or interact with the staff. Say as little as necessary in your description.

For a few different reasons, an actual geocaching event cannot be held on board. It's better to have them on shore, anyway, since that would allow a local to come or someone from another boat. Those are remote possibilities, but very cool ones. I don't know of a reason why you can't have an event onboard on the first day at sea. There are all kinds of meet-ups going on, we've been to several. Are you referring to Groundspeak rules or ship rules? Edit to ask: would this be a "Traveling Event"?

The first time I adopted out caches was about 20 caches along a bike trail. Someone just contacted me out of the blue and offered to take care of them. I hate maintenance, so I was thrilled. The new owners never changed my name to theirs. They lived right off the trail but eventually dropped out of the game. The caches died a horrible agonizing slow embarrassing death. I did go back for maintenance once before a nearby event, but couldn't finish the whole trail. As far as I know, nobody ever did maintenance on them again. Next time someone adopted a popular/favorited cache I changed the owner name from mine to theirs before I clicked send. I haven't looked back at it yet. So that was the important thing for me - to remove my name from the cache and I was able to completely let it go. Now we travel so we aren't in one place long enough to keep a cache, so have archived them all as they've gone missing or muggles with apps can't find them.

It strikes me as a little odd that you would mix a day of "dirty" geocaching with visiting shops and cafes. When I'm out for a day of urban caching I wear the old stained/torn clothes and old tenny shoes with laces full of sandspurs. I'm barely fit to be seen in a Wally's BEFORE I get filthy! Afterward I'm relegated to fast food drive-thrus. I guess it's a different story if you're going out shopping/dining with a random P&G in-between.

You do realize that a TV remote has more germs on it than a toilet seat? You do realize that I was being sarcastic?

Yes, its much safer to sit at home and watch TV!

I think the first thing we need to know is what kind of GPS are you using and do you have a Premium membership at geocaching.com. I have a Garmin Oregon and there are several ways to send waypoints to it. I don't remember any of those requiring me to check a user agreement box? Can you tell us where/how you are trying to download? I usually use GSAK (Geocaching Swiss Army Knife) for sorting the waypoints (which is free or you can pay to upgrade). You just click a few tabs and highlight the area of the map you want waypoints for; they are loaded into GSAK by api. Sometimes I'll run a PQ (pocket query) at geocaching.com to get a big batch of waypoints. This is a Premium Member feature. It is received as a zip file; I think the maximum is 500 waypoints and there is a limit of 5 PQs per day. I'll drag & drop the zip file into GSAK to take a look at the caches and filter out the ones with 4-5 recent DNF (did not find) logs, or the ones with higher difficulty or terrain than I'm in the mood for. Without GSAK or premium membership, I think your only options are to download one at a time from each cache page or from a search results page. Once we have more info we can help you better.

When I placed my first caches (a decade ago), I was advised by the local cachers to keep the description as simple as possible, and soon discovered it was good advice. One of the old-timers used "Be safe & have fun" for all of his descriptions. In all honesty, when I have loaded up 5000 waypoints and I'm on my bike geocaching downtown, I do NOT read every description! I have the cache names set up to include size, type and D/T e.g. TM22 for a traditional micro, D/T 2/2. If I've been at GZ a few minutes or need to deflect muggles, I will check for hints/previous logs. Rarely do I ever check the description. So no need to pour your heart and soul into the description only to be rejected for technicalities or ignored by finders. If someone comments about the location in their find log, you can always respond and tell them how special the location is to you. Perhaps the cache description is not the best venue for personality. Cache on!

Someone with your type of phone could answer that. What are you using to go geocaching?

We don't know if you found it by accident or if you have the coordinates in your GPS. If you have the coordinates, the GC number is in the upper right hand side of the cache description page. You don't need it to log your find. If you found a wild cache, go to geocaching.com. Where it says "Learn Play Community Shop" click on "Play" > "Find a Cache" and type in "Baytown, TX". You'll get over 700 results. To the lower right of the Search button you'll see "Map these results". It'll take a moment to load, then by zooming in on the map you can find the boat ramp. Check descriptions of the caches nearby to see which matches the best with what you found. Check location, size, difficulty, hints, etc. Good luck, and cache on!

Gosh, if you posted the night before leaving, you didn't give us much time to gift you. You don't have much time to download waypoints either. Have a safe trip.

by boat? Sorry, I'm a smart4$$. There are several Virtuals along the strip and downtown.

I am wondering if your quest for cleanness affects things in your life other than geocaching and events. I am a nurse and we don't leave home without hand sanitizer. I often wipe tables at fast food places with Lysol wipes, the kind tough enough they say NOT to use them on your body. When I go caching, I am careful not to touch my face and wipe down the steering wheel after the trip, but between caches I am comfortable with staying "dirty". Caches are dirty, just because they are outdoors exposed to, well, whatever nature does to/on them. Like TS I have been fortunate to rarely get sick and before last June, I had not been to a doctor in over 20 years. I don't quite understand how you feel that events are "dirty". Quite interesting...

Worst of our finds.

I have an Oregon 550t. When you load up your GPS from GSAK, under "GPS" > "Send Waypoints" there is a box to click on the right that says "Clear GPS before sending". If you have checked that, all previous geocaches you loaded up are gone. They would still be in your GSAK file if you haven't deleted that. It sounds like you are just getting the finds, tracks and waypoints you marked along the way on one trip. When I click "GPS" > "Receive Waypoints" I have to choose between geocaches and waypoints, so I'm not sure about that. Are you trying to move files into GSAK instead of just plugging in the GPS and clicking on their tabs? To get a list, I would just run a fresh PQ or do a new "Geocaching.com access" > "Get geocaches" for the area you want. That way you won't get archived or, if you choose, disabled caches. You can add a list of PQ'd "My Finds" if you want an inclusive list. Good Luck.

Congrats! It's a sturdy little GPS. It'll take a few hours of playing around with. Plan on several short geocaching trips as you get to know it. (I assume it came with a manual).

Congrats on finding a new inexpensive, family friendly hobby! Since we don't have info on what kind of phone you are using, I would suggest a Garmin eTrex for beginners. Amazon has an eTrex 10 for about $80 right now. Not many bells & whistles but I think you will like the battery life/easy replacement of batteries over using a phone to geocache. Of course it will take a few trips to figure out how to use the GPS.