tielyn

Hiya again -- I gave the speech today, and everyone loved it. Turns out two of our members were sometimes-cachers, and one member who had heard of it but never tried it was enthusiastic enough that she intends to go play when she visits her nieces and nephews this weekend. I brought a pseudo-cache container with me, and passed around a travel bug and a geocoin, and gave a demo of the geocaching site afterwards at lunch. Thank you all for your comments and input -- the one lady said, "Wow, there are -that- many people doing this?" and one of the other members said that he found out about geocaching because he caught someone wandering down a creek bed and sticking something in a lamppost. edited to add: One of the more complimentary things my speech reviewer said was that they were more likely to give it a try because it seemed like a great team event and a great community out there, since the way I set up my slides was I alternated various people's reasons with snapshots from the site or that I'd taken on the hunt to correspond with what all of you were saying. Y'all rock. -Tielyn PS. I followed the link and now I finally get the Euwell Gibbons joke.

Hiya folks. Having been bitten by the cache bug earlier this year, I'm busy trying to introduce it to anyone who thinks my -other- habit (NaNoWriMo) is crazy. I'm a member of a Toastmasters club to learn better public speaking, and project #8 involves Visual Aids. Naturally, I figured showcasing www.geocaching.com, bringing in a GPS, a geocoin, and a TB I just found today would be some good talking points. But the other aspect of the project is to convince people to take action, and this is where I could use some thoughts. What's your reason for geocaching, month after month, year after year? What keeps it interesting to you? By default, I'm going with: - It's great incentive to exercise. I get out more often in a month than I did all of last year. Rain or shine (mostly shine, since clouds mess up my signal), hot or cold, light or dark, I'm on a mission to make 200 finds by the end of the year without resorting to a power trail. I make a point of parking in a central location and then walking to all the caches instead of parking next to them when I can. - It's fun to explore -- and sometimes educational. I've found so many cool places, places I'd otherwise just drive by and never know about, because other geocachers have left a cache there which made me come there. Today's was a little bird estuary observation point with picnic tables and informative placards about the wetlands. - It's a mental challenge as much as a physical challenge. Besides the puzzle cache types, the GPS only gets you to the area. You have to sometimes think like the person doing the hide -- where would you put a cache in this area? - Learning the place you live in. -- I've lived in the area for 17 years now, and yet it's only recently I've seen more back roads, side roads, and cross-town expressways than I can recall because I actually haven't been just driving point A to point B and back home. I'm starting to get a really good feel of where the major roads cross each other. I used to get lost pretty easily, but if I've been to a cache nearby, I know where I am because I've been there before. - It's encouragement to go out and do something -- even for folks who hate travel. -- There have been times where I've really not wanted to go somewhere (a dentist, classes for work, that sort of thing) but then I check to see if there are nearby caches and suddenly I'm motivated to go. ("Oh, a distant cousin's wedding? Hey, I haven't been to that state yet, and I can hit two other nearby states and get web badges?") If there are other reasons not listed above that you'd like to share, let me know. I'll give you credit in Powerpoint by your caching name during the speech if I use your reason. Kind regards, -Tielyn

Thanks for the war stories, folks. Much appreciated -- I feel better now. I love the idea of travel bugs and helping them along especially, and I'd hate to give up that part of the caching experience for fear of being an accidental bug killer. One more anecdote I found out after I made the post by way of doing a maintenance sweep on the caches I've found: The bug that met its untimely end in San Francisco was retrieved from a cache that had been active less than a month (17 days after listing when I found it), and said cache was found by gardeners and muggled three days after I found and traded bugs with the one in the cache. Fortunately for -that- bug, someone else came in the day after I did and retrieved it (new caches get a lot of traffic), or I would've been up to four dead bugs instead of three... so maybe Remove Before Flight was doomed no matter what. *sheepish look* -Tielyn

Hey folks. Relatively new cacher here, and I'd like to solicit some experience thoughts from some of the older hands out there. Of the 10 trackables I've moved, three of them went AWOL directly after I dropped them off, which makes me feel sad and guilty, despite taking every precaution possible to find 'safe' havens for them: -- one of them was placed a cache that required a terrain 3 climb well off the beaten path, bushwhacking, and needed the clue to discover which outcropping of rocks to search, and was not visible from any road or trail. Admittedly, it was a cute puppy plush attached to a dog tag... -- one of them was left in a TB hotel that has been safely found by other cachers since, so it wasn't muggled either...I left it there because the TB's goal was 'visit airports', so I figured getting it to the closest TB hotel to SFO would be a good plan. -- one of them was a geocoin that I dropped in a out-of-the-way urban parking lot cache (-not- a LPC), also found by others since I dropped off the coin, and when I went back to drop off a fresh log (owner hasn't responded to calls for a new log for a month and a half, so I did the good cacher deed and swung by with a fresh log) ... no coin. In the case of the first two, I took the liberty of checking in with the cachers who logged finds after I did but before a later cacher who left a note saying 'No TBs here...' and got either 'wasn't there when I was there either' or no response at all, making those folks likely suspects, which I passed along to the bug owner. The third one I only discovered missing in action last night. I'm thusly presently feeling rather disconsolate about being a courier for TBs, even though from a logical standpoint, I feel I'm picking decent places to leave bugs behind (well hidden caches that casual muggles won't find) because I feel like they've gone missing on my watch, in a way, and my placement was in error. I know deep down that I have more 'catch and released safely' bugs* than dead ones so far, but nobody wants to be the one that kills a bug that's been on a unbelievably long journey; it's like ending a baseball hitting streak. One of the missing ones had traveled 32K miles, and it always bugs me when I check my Trackables list and see that ? Unknown location in the list, and I can't help feeling like it's my fault. For those of you that have much higher bug counts -- is this normal for some fair percentage of your bug moves to vanish right after you've done the responsible thing and set a TB back out into the world, and it's just my smaller sample size being the issue? Regards, -Tielyn * Thankfully, the other bug I took to Texas with me is alive and kicking...

This is one of those things where it really is 'your mileage may vary.' Snag the bug, contact the owner immediately expressing your intentions to hang onto it for a month and ask if it's okay. Remember that there's a live person on the other end, and by picking up their TB it's an unspoken contract to keep it safe until you drop it off. You are not the only one traveling to said destinations -- you can always drop it in a TB hotel near the airport and entrust it to someone else to take it in your stead. But it's always fun to want to take responsibility for helping a bug reach its goal, and I am definitely not immune to that want! The most I've ever held a bug was two months -- but its goals were kinda special -- 'take pictures with cows', and I had cows behind my house and a trip to Texas planned in those two months. I got the owner's permission to hang onto it as long as I occasionally tagged other caches in the meantime to keep the TB 'moo-ving', and dropped it in TX Day 2 of the trip. Now it's happily wandering around its new digs, but sadly, nobody has taken pictures of it with cows since. Usually if I'm not going to be going on a trip fairly soon, I'll snag bugs that haven't seen any movement in about a month, and then drop them within two weeks or less of picking them up. -Tielyn

See, if you told me up front that you had to bring wading boots, a caving helmet, and a flashlight, I'd be all for taking on your evil hide (...the next time I'm in Scotland, anyway.) I believe that being prepared to fight The Evil is what puts the 'fun' back into 'bad evil' hides -- you're ready to be challenged, rather than showing up at a 18' high hide without a grabber (I mean, really, who carries a stepladder as part of their geocaching kit?), or attempting to find a black blinker tucked away inside a hollow object at night. This prompts finders to leave cryptic notes saying, 'I was unprepared for this hide..." and that kinda note gives me pause. If the description seems to indicate what's involved, I'll give it a visit anyway on a sweep just to get the lay of the land -- you never know from the description what you're in for until you arrive on the spot (like the hide where GZ appeared to be underwater from recent flooding). A little story, if I may: How to hook your long distance relationship on your weird hobby while saving money on vacation: Go after 'good evil' puzzle hides. Case example was a set of themed hides in Texas -- the Flying Monkeys. The CO wrote in the description that you were going to be hiking a trail, and the puzzle hide of the bunch was a night hide with a 'voting box' at the end. There were five normal hides and four names -- and having completed a 'series puzzle cache' where each cache contained a code, I figured that the only way Tela and I were going to find it was to find all five of the monkeys. Each normal hide was a carbon copy of the others, and had the simple hint: 'Just hanging around.' GZ proved to be a -very- big tree. The problem was, we arrived at sunset, and while we were bushwhacking to ground zero, not only did the sun set, but the lights of the nearby ballfield went out. We looked around the tree with my itty bitty flashlight for a bit, got stuck several times, and finally called it quits after an hour and a half of searching for some of the others in pitch blackness in the hopes that they would be smaller trees or something. The next day I remapped out each of the normals and discovered one wasn't actually on the trail -- and was posted after the puzzle hide -- a red herring? We hit that one first, and I was able to show Tela her first bison tube -- (she was the one that found the fishing line attached to what looked like a tag to her). Now that we knew what color camo tape the CO was using, we were MUCH better prepared to go back after the other normals. ...and they were still pains in the tail to turn up, because the GZ coordinates kept bouncing even with a backup GPS to triangulate with. It took some trail reading, geocaching sense, and in one case, pure blind luck for us to find them all, and as night fell on a five hour search day, we noticed that my flashlight wasn't going to cut it for a night hunt. So we hit the local grocery store, picked up a much better flashlight, and went back the next night to do the night cache. The CO had taken the time to write out how to follow the trail in the clear, and we trooped into the pitch black woods with only a flashlight and the stars to guide our way, and at the end of it was a cache you had to find in the dark with only a flashlight. Granted, it was a pretty big cache container, but it was also heavily camo'd with only the hint 'it's okay to go off the trail here'. And once you found it, you had to have the right vote code handy. ...and we got briefly lost trying to get out, because we'd gotten ourselves turned around, and I realized that backtracking to the cache location and then walking backwards to reverse orienteer by the stars was the best way to escape. Most favorite cache series to date, despite the hundred degree heat, humidity, gashes from stickers, and needing to buy a flashlight upgrade, because the CO put a lot of work into designing a theme, hiding the caches, and giving you -just- enough to do the deed as long as you were willing to do the work to get the hides. The girlfriend and I had had a lot of other activities planned on our vacation -- museums, spelunking, movies, that sort of thing -- but we wound up geocaching most of the week instead. "It really is that fun." she told her friends when she got home. Now she's trying to hook them on it. Maybe a better definition of 'evil bad' versus 'evil good' might be 'evil good makes you work for it, and is that much more satisfying when you get it', and 'evil bad is simply impossible to even begin to try and find it without direct assistance above and beyond the hint (or lack thereof) or blind luck'. -Tielyn

(Apologies in advance for necro'ing an old post, but a cache I'm trying to find suggested searching for this thread in the forums, and I had an opinion to volunteer for what seems to be a still-relevant notion.) Sometimes I like a challenge. Light post hides, while novel when my cache count was below 10, are no-brainers now, and only good for when I need a quick cache find to avoid the dreaded 'long dry spell streak' or when I'm showing someone new the caching hobby. Quality is better than quantity, to me -- I'm not sure whether those '100 caches along a short stretch of trail the minimum distance apart' construes cheating, so I've avoided them so far. Things that make a cache 'good' for me: - Ones where the hide makes you use your eyes, or makes you try and think like the cache owner. - Ones where the theme fits the hide, showing originality. Things which make a cache 'evil good' for me: - Ones where when you do use the hint in the right way to figure it out, it makes perfect sense. - Ones with camo so good that you only find it when you touch the thing and it moves if it's magnetic, or when you suddenly realize that the paintjob is just slightly off from stuff around it. - Ones that involve creative puzzle solving -- one of my recent favorites involved having to go to the Web to do some research to do it right, but also could be solved by brute force. Things which makes a cache 'evil bad' for me: - Ones where you would never find it without serious extra help or blind luck -- such as being stuffed inside a gumball machine container that's buried under leaves because it was left in a planter area. - Ones where your GPS bounce is so erratic that you're within 78 feet of GZ when your coordinates zero out and stop working, and you're looking for an unknown micro size cache. - Ones where you're literally searching the forest for the trees, with no idea whether you're looking at the right tree, bush, or rock, because there are so many of them with so many leaves -- and the container is a camo bison. Now, being still somewhat new to caching, I didn't know that when someone says their cache is "evil", they -mean it-. I take the challenges as they come, because I'm always big on looking until I find it as long as I can keep coming back, and I never ask for help until I feel I've done due diligence and scoured the area -hard- just in case the cache has been muggled. I'm still a lot shy about meeting fellow cachers, but maybe I'll get over it someday soon. In the mean time, I've certainly found a few 'good', 'evil good', and 'evil bad' caches so far... Learned something new today: 'avoid the evil unless I want to be out there until sunset!' -Tielyn

Just converted my account to Premium yesterday (promised myself if I hit 100 finds I'd treat myself), and jumped through the hoops that are the GSAK/Poiloader. It gives a couple of errors here and there, but I managed to get it working on my nuvi 265W. One of the big hurdles is that GSAK doesn't actually create any directory files as other windows apps do -- you have to manually go into the File Explorer and make new folders, then point the programs to where the folders are. -Tielyn