lmcgisme

I have a travel bug, Prancin' Pony , which I dropped off in Thailand five months ago. The bugs only mission was to keep prancing, visiting as many caches as possible. Having dropped the bug 8,000+ miles away I thought it would travel to new and exciting places. No such luck. After going directly to Canada it headed steadily east until it was just dropped in a cache a mere ten miles from my home! It almost beat me back. Does anyone else have stories of a TB they dropped far away that came back home - with nothing in the TB's mission stating it wanted to go home, or TB's that did the oposite of what you had hoped?

As long as the TB's made the trip they should get credit for the miles, even if they just visited the cache and weren't left there. Its a pretty common practice to dip TB like that, and IMHO a good thing, not bad form at all.

Little dinos (and frogs) are really popular around here, and that's the type of stuff I like to find. A little momento of the cache hunt to go on my shelves. You might want to bring little baggies with you so if the cache looks like it could get wet or dirty your critters will stay clean and dry. I think that may be part of the problem with junk in caches - it starts out good but gets wet or dirty in the cache or broken from being pulled out or jostled around too much. Not that it was good quality if it broke easily, but the cacher placing it didn't put it in broken, but with the best of intentions. At least the broken ones I've found seem to have all their parts in the cache, as if they were together when they went in.

My own TB Prancin' Pony has traveled 16,328.2 miles since January, 2006. I started its first big jump, starting it close to home then taking it to Thailand. Someone picked it up in Thailand, and brought it all the way back to Canada - in two jumps it had 15,000+ miles. The mission was to travel the world - not come back home, but the last cache it was in is less than 500 miles from me! Hopefully it will start heading away again, instead of ever closer.

You could post a message in the Wisconsin Geocachers Assoc. Help forum asking someone to grab it and either move it along or send it back. I'm not sure if making it more appealing is a good idea, since one of the tips to make a TB live longer is to not make it too cute. The cute ones tend to get picked up and kept.

I had the same problem this morning. Usually I get my pocket queries with no problem, and this morning my email did have three pq's that are run every Friday. I created two new pq's this morning for the long weekend, each with a unique name, and both are bold and say that they have been run. I recieved the first one in my email, but the second one hasn't shown up, and its been a couple hours since it said it ran. I'd try again, except that it was my fifth pq of the day, so I guess I'm just out of luck.

If you get as far north as Minneapolis I'd suggest you swing east into Wisconsin, around the Eau Claire area. It's about an hour from the twin cities on I94. I haven't been caching there yet (hopefully will next week), but the Wisconsin Geocachers Assoc. message boards has a current topic with recommended caches in the Eau Claire area. Heading over there would also give you a change of scenery from what you'd have seen coming north from OK.

I think that limiting directions in PQs would be a good idea. I don't like caching in big cities, but there are a couple of them not too far east and southeast of me, both with tons of caches. My limit of 500 caches in a PQ is quickly used up by caches in those areas, reducing the distance I can go in all other directions. Right now I do several PQs to cover the area I want, then eliminate the cities with GSAK. Having the ability to eliminate those directions in a PQ would cut down on the number on PQs I'd need to run each week, saving server CPU. I could go to the edge of the city for my center and ignore anything east or southeast, greatly expanding my search distance in the other directions.

In GSAK, when you export a cachemate file, you can build the waypoint name using tags. Be sure you have it set to %code, not %smart - the "smart name" that GSAK creates, or %name. Also, in cachemate you have the option of sorting by waypoint or name - be sure you select waypoint (wpt). Sorry I can't help with the found caches - I only download caches I'm searching for, so I've never tried to transfer already found caches to my palm. Once the caches are on the palm you can Log them as found manually (select 'log' upper right corner drop down list). HTH

Sounds like a neat idea for a birthday present. First I'd suggest a small backpack or fanny pack to carry the stuff, a small flashlight, and a walking stick (lots of forum topics on a good/inexpensive ones to get). Other ideas might be a small first aid kit, gloves, mirror, notebook and pencil, and batteries. For trade trinkets/swag check out "Everything for $1.00" type stores - lots of good stuff there.

Whether I ask permission depends on where I place the cache. I placed a few in my town's parks. Their park policy (on the web) is that the parks are for general recreational use, and no mention was made of needing any permits unless you're going to have a large group of people. I didn't ask permission, since geocaching is a recreational use. I'm planning a series of several caches I'll place on DNR hunting land. In that instance I did ask permission, since they state that most of the funding for the land came from hunting licenses and that its intent wasn't for general recreation. I did get approval for 2 of the 3 parcels I asked about, and am still waiting to hear on the third. I can understand why people don't ask, though. It took me over four months to get approval for the first parcel, and that doesn't count the time it took to track down the right person to ask. Each parcel has a different land manager, so its been a major PITA. It would have been much easier to just hide the caches, since the parcels already have caches hidden on them, and the DNR hasn't objected yet.

It depends. When I'm caching alone I usually log what I traded both in the log and on-line. If I'm caching with my nieces and nephews I usually can't keep track of who traded what where - I'm busy just making sure they trade just one item and trade up or even. I'll note in the logs that we traded, but not specific items, unless it is something unique or something we really liked.

I usually cache alone, with my (female) geopup, since my hubby usually is working evenings and Saturdays. I'm much more into it than he is, although he likes to ones hidden out in the wildlife areas. I get the urban park caches without him, since he doesn't enjoy those anyhow, and save the longer hikes for when we can go together. At those times giving him the gps definitely helps keep his interest up.

We just got one, but Chubbles has been wearing it geocaching ever since it came.

If it was that important to you, what prevented you from editing the date to Thursday, right when you got the e-mail notice that your cache had been published? The point I was trying to make was that the suggested work around, updating the placed date right before submitting, wouldn't work well in some cases. My pq to pick up new caches in the last week, run weekly, would still miss them. I didn't mean to imply that I was overly concerned about my personal cache not being 'New' for long, just used it as an example. Being an admitted newbie to hiding caches, I was wondering how event cache listings worked. How can something be published before its placed?

I, too, wish that the 'New' was associated with the published date and not the planted date, because the work around doesn't always work. I just recently placed my first cache on a Saturday, and submitted the listing to be reviewed on the same day. For somereason - my first cache, reviewer on vacation, whatever, it didn't get published until Thursday. That means it was New for only two days, and its week was up. Using the workaround and changing the Placed Date wouldn't have helped in this case, but associating New with Published date would have.

Before I went paperless I used to carry a small notebook with me to jot notes. Nothing fancy like a journal, but somewhere that I could write the name of the cache, trades, and any interesting notes about the journey. Otherwise when doing several caches in a day I'd get mixed up about what I traded where, or forget about the cute little fawn we saw until after posting the online log. The notebook helped with that, but wasn't meant to be a keepsake journal or anything. Now with a pda and cachemate, which has a log screen all set up, it is much easier.

Two dogs, two cats, and one pot bellied pig. The geopup I use as my avatar is my main geocaching pup, Chubbles. She knows the words caching & camping, and gets really excited about either. If my hubby goes along we'll take our other dog, too. If you click on my name to go to my profile, then to my gallery, you'll see some dog pictures. Good luck with the project.

I don't see any problem with all five kids (and you) trading, as long as you're trading up or trading even. If they were all there to find the cache they all have a right to trade. When I take my neices & nephew along that's how we play the game.

Thanks for the replies - its been interesting reading. If I understand this, basically the problem is that the kml creating script(?) has a problem of not putting an escape character in front of a special unicode character that the cache page writer has somehow included on the page. There is nothing I can do about it now, short of removing the problem caches from the list, but hopefully it will be fixed in the next release. Is that correct, or is there a fix I can do on my side? Its not a big deal, since I can now run a PQ from the bookmark list and load the .gpx file into Google Earth. Iit would be really nice if I didn't have to do the extra steps and if I didn't have to use up one of my daily PQ allowances.

Hi, First of all, a big thank you for the new features. I really like being able to use Google Earth to get a visual of the caches in an area, and being able to create a PQ from a bookmark list. Sorry if this has been asked before - I've searched & read the recent threads on kml to no avail. I'm having problems loading a kml file from a bookmark list into Google Earth. The odd thing is that it will work for one bookmark list, but not another. My bookmark list has only 12 items, and I can view & edit the list with no problem, but when I "Download Google Earth KML" and try to open it in Google Earth I get the error: "Parse Error: Invalid Character (Unicode:0x1B) at line 62" I've tried it several times, both yesterday & today, always with the same results. I have another bookmark list with 23 items that works just fine when I create a KML file & open it in Google Earth. There's no real difference between the lists, both are just groupings of active caches in my area. Any one else having this problem, and is there a workaround for it?

Thanks for the reply. I agree splitting up wouldn't be as much fun, but could run the numbers up higher. I was guessing that the way you explained it was probably the way its done, but being a newbie I was just curious.

I've been wondering how this team thing works. Does everyone on the team need to find/log the cache in order to log it as a team find - did you have to visit all 240 caches? Or, say you have a team of 24, you split up and each find 10 caches alone, do you log it as a team find, rather than 24 individuals each logging 10 finds? If so it would seem that the number of finds in a day has more to do with the team size than with actually finding lots of caches. Just a curious newbie, I'm not in it for the numbers or trying to break any records.

I've used the Belkin serial-to-USB adapter to download waypoints from EasyGPS. It did take me a while to figure out how to get it set up & working. IIRC, when you send the waypoints you pick the port you want to use. When I first started I'd pick 'USB', since it was on the USB plugin, but I got the same 'can't find port' error you did. When I switched the port to 'comm 4' (or whatever comm port Belkin set up on - should be your highest number) it worked fine. It seems like I also need to have the adapter plugged in before booting my laptop. If I plug it in after I've booted up the laptop thinks its a pointing device and the mouse bounces all over the screen. That could be just me though, as I plugged the adapter in before installing the driver - just what it tells you not to do. Also double check your baud rate to be sure your gps & EasyGPS have the same number, and the NMEA setting (Either off or V2.1 GSA - EasyGPS likes it one way and my mapping program likes it another, and I can't remember off hand which is which) A few weeks ago I switched from EasyGPS to GSAK so my EasyGPS memory isn't that great. If you're still having problems I can double check what I did to get it set up. BTW - I use a Meridian Color, but that shouldn't matter with the error you got. HTH, Lisa