Tickbait

I've used GOOP for many and varied applications and have very rarely been disappointed with its performance, however I have to second Cotati's rec of Gorilla Glue. It's just the strongest, most durable, and easy-to-use general purpose adhesive I've found yet.

It's fun. The rest is meaningless semantics.

USAF 1969-72. I didn't much care for military life but I got to spend two years in Japan. Someday I'll go back for a visit; some of the prettiest country and finest people on Earth. Sure would love to do some caching there.

Ten degrees F at the moment, and it looks like that's going to be the warmest we'll see for the next few days so I'm staying inside. A couple of decades ago I would have considered this to be excellent hiking and even tent-camping weather; the woods are so hushed and solitary in the cold and snow. But the blood doesn't get to the feet so well now, so I'll be content for today to stretch out with another big, steaming bowl of goulash and watch the Portland-UCLA Women's College Cup.

Here's a thought... so what if they are "cheating"? Who are they cheating? THEMSELVES. Personally, I have logged every one of my meager 267 finds. If someone wants to claim a find when they didn't actually find it...well, to me that's like cheating in Solitaire. What's the point? Well said!

Heck, I've been LTF on every one of the 170 caches I've done...until the next cacher came along.

On a marginally related topic, I think one of our local Black Hills caches holds the record for longest placement-to-first find; almost four years. Of course, it wasn't actually listed all during that time, but it's a very interesting story. A couple of local guys placed a cache deep in a rocky canyon shortly after Geocaching first began to become popular, then lost the coordinates and became occupied with raising family and other things and stopped hiking together, never got around to going back out to relocate and list the cache. Then last summer one of the two, a very popular and gifted local school teacher, died in a tragic accident while out jogging one morning. His friend decided to go back out and relocate the cache and list it as a tribute to his fallen buddy. The cache had been found and signed by several hikers in the meantime, but I was very proud to be the first actual geocacher to hunt and find it. Check out GCR4AD, Andrew's Cache, and if you find yourself in the area don't pass up the chance to find it. It's really one of the better caches, scenery-wise, in the area.

people will start lableing us as wierd people. Too late.

Oh, as a webcam cache, of course. Heh...sorry about that, not thinking too swiftly this afternoon.

Hey, that is NEAT! Excellent advertising idea. What do you mean when you say, can anyone use it, though? Are you thinking someone could employ that in setting up a cachesite? That would be pretty cool, I would think, but I can't come up with a way to do it. Any ideas?

Just gas up in Sioux Falls at dawn and head west...anything that rises far enough above the horizon to throw a shadow is probably a cachebox.

How do I find them? Delicious!! But seriously, folks...I don't have to find them, they find me. I used to call my dog "tickbait" until I noticed they seemed to like me better. Next time I find one embedded though (not that common actually, once in last 3 years), I'm going to try the straw thing, sounds like the real deal.

What is wrong with nerds and their activities? That's what I'd like to know, too! Any psychoanylists out there?

I agree completely with all the posters who have said here that this is clearly a case of "If you don't like it, just don't participate". I pass up all kinds of caches that just don't appeal to me personally, but I don't see any reason to disparage them; maybe they're just what someone else was looking for. One man's trash and all that. That having been said, I will put in my two cents on the SA..... Last holiday season NPR featured an interview with an SA officer about their organization. When asked what percentage of collected funds goes to actually help the needy, the man hemmed and hawed and finally said that it was "a tremendous, just a tremendous amount". This man was a "captain" in the Army, and as such I have to assume he would have this info at hand as it is the most important figure there can be for any charitable organization. He simply didn't want to say what it was on public radio. Next up in the interview was the state attorney general and when asked if there were any red flags to watch for when dealing with charities, his reply was, "Well, if they won't say how much of their money goes out to the poor, that is the big one right there." That, together with some bad press locally about a few really questionable perks for the area SA bigwigs, convinced me that my charity dollar should go elsewhere.

I'm based in Black Hawk. Like 1Setter, I probably would not participate in group caching activities. Much as I enjoy communicating with other cachers in cyberspace, the main reason I go into the woods is to enjoy the solitude there, and caching has helped me find more places to enjoy the serenity of nature. That said, I would encourage all of you with a more social bent to organize; public activities can only improve the general image of the hobby.

Daytrip by motorcycle to "Carhenge" in Crawford, Nebraska, 141 miles.

Inactivity. About a year before I got a GPS, I quit smoking and took up mountain biking to try and get my lungs back after 34 years (!) of nicotine addiction, but I was having a hard time with motivation. Then I got a secondhand Garmin 12 XL from an old elk hunter and stumbled onto Geocaching.com and all of a sudden I wanted to pedal to work every day just to stay in good enough shape to get out into the woods on the weekends to hunt caches. For me, there's no better way to hunt, locally, than by bicycle; you can easily cover 30+ miles in a morning, and be silent enough in your travel to see most of the wildlife that the motorized folks miss out on. Without having found this fun incentive, I really doubt I'd have stuck with it.

In one local cache I found a dried-out cigarette that some well-meaning fool had left, no doubt figuring that someone would need it after hiking a whole quarter-mile up the trail. I try to remember that with very few exceptions, the items left in a cache had some value to the one dropping them off; that mctoy that seems to just be taking up space may have been a great sacrifice for the four-year-old learning that he has to give up something if he wants to have the pretty cardinal feather that caught his eye. On the other hand, I recently grabbed an unlabeled CD in a baggie that I fully expected to have Yannie or some such nonsense on it, and when I got back to the car and plugged it in found an excellent handmade collection of Dave Mattews, Blues Traveller, Tom Petty and more that has become one of my favorites!

I had used my nickname as an affectionate name for my woods-loving dog prior to getting into caching, but when trying to come up with something to call myself it occured to me that after a long hike I would often remove more than twice the number of the hideous little monsters from my own carcass as from his. They just seem to like me. Thank the gods for DEET!

Thanks for all the comebacks, even the smart-aleck ones . Actually, I got the notion from a political cartoon. Good to have solid information on it. Though I've been caching for three years now, I'd never perused these forums before a couple days ago or I'd probably have been better informed.

I heard just yesterday that the Feds are contemplating reinstituting scrambling of the satellite transmissions, restricting it once again to military applications due to security concerns. Has anyone else heard anything about this?