Thrak

Most folks don't leave anything for FTF. Heck, the majority of caches these days are freaking micro caches that won't hold anything anyway. I've left gold dollars in my "film-can-sized" caches for FTF. I've found $1, $2, $5, and even a $10 FTF prizes. I've found FTF pins and certificates. (I used to do a lot of FTF caching.) One of the local cachers (retiredprof) has about a zillion caches hidden. He leaves a $2 bill in his for FTF. Some of the local cachers will say there's a "recycled deuce" or a "recycled retiredprof deuce" in their caches as a FTF hide. These are $2 bills that they found in one of retiredprof's caches when they were FTF. If you live in an area with an active FTF person be aware that many (likely most) of your FTF prizes will go to the same person.

If you haven't been injured in some way you aren't a "real" geocacher! One of the (reasonably) local geocachers dropped the log and, as he reached down for it, a rattlesnake shot out of a hole in a tree (not at ground level) and bit him on the hand between the thumb and forefinger. He made it down the hill, made someone else drive his vehicle to the hospital, and then collapsed when he went through the hospital door. I think he spent about a week in the hospital. Another (very) local geocacher broke BOTH ankles. Ouch. Stuff happens. I've bashed myself, skinned myself, removed a bunch of skin from my inner arm, had numerous outbreaks of poison oak, etc. It's part of geocaching - especially if you do it in the dark.

NEXT UP: BRING BACK VIRTUALS - MY OWN PERSONAL UNIQUE VIEW NOT HELD BY ANYBODY ELSE EVER. Ohh... Ohh... Ohh!!! Can we follow up that one with a "Why isn't there a nano category" thread?

Of course, in the early days, there weren't a zillion micro and nano caches hidden in stupid places. Finding a full-sized cache hidden in a spot you'd actually like to visit makes it far more worth the effort of finding a cache with "iffy" coordinates. Looking for an urban micro in a garbage strewn alley or a busy downtown plaza with poor coordinates isn't worth the effort. (Of course I don't think those caches would be worth the effort even if the most expensive Trimble was used for spot-on coordinates but there are a lot of them hidden and a lot of folks will look for them.)

Please don't discuss Platinum membership. You KNOW you aren't supposed to do it so why bring it up at all? (See you all at the next Platinum event. If it's anything like the last one it should be great. Hopefully there won't be quite so many folks with massive hangovers this time though.)

I've won a number of prizes at events from swag to cache containers. I generally tend to find someone else to give my winning ticket to. I have more cache containers already than I have good places to hide them. I won my choice of prizes one time and selected a nice set of hot wheels cars. I gave them to the son of another person at the event. I've won my choice of stuff a number of times and almost always gave the ticket to someone else. Once I won and slipped the ticket onto the table of a couple who had gone to the counter to pick up pizza or something. When they got back they discovered the ticket on their table and claimed their prize. I've never won a 50/50 where they sell tickets and the winner gets half the cash and the other half goes to our local group (N.U.T.S.). I remember when we were going to co-sponser GW VI. We had a pretty good 50/50 going and several of us stated that, if we won, we'd just donate our winnings back to the N.U.T.S. to help finance GW VI. I believe the person who won that one did, in fact, do that very thing. I can't imagine anybody at a N.U.T.S. even getting peeved about prizes.

Years ago my son wanted me to play Dark Age of Camelot online. He mistakenly thought that a segment from "The Tick" had a character named Thrakamazod. He made a toon called Amzod and I made one called Thrak. (The character's name was actually Thrakazog.) The Tick: "I've had enough chasing; it's your turn now, forest-smog!" Thrakazog: "Thrakazog! Thrakazog! With a 'K'! Boy, are you ever rude." The Tick: "No brains today; we're only serving humble-pie, Whatchamazog!" Thrakazog: "Listen buddy, for the last time it's..." The Tick: "Four ax in a bog?" Thrakazog: "Thrakazog!" The Tick: "Ah, laxative-log!" Thrakazog: "No no no!" The Tick: "Lap lands a zog?" Thrakazog: "No!" The Tick: "Two laplanders and a dog?" Thrakazog: "Thrak!" The Tick: "Sapsuckafrog!" Thrakazog: "No no no!" The Tick: "...Susan?" Thrakazog: "Oh, now you're doing it on purpose; how juvenile!" I had wasted 3.5 years of my life in that stupid online game. I played 2 - 16 hours a day. Every day. A neighbor told me about geocaching and I went home and created an account to check out the forums. For convenience sake I just used the same name - Thrak - thinking I could always change it later. It turned out to be a nice short name to sign on logs so I kept it. Once I found geocaching I never gamed online again. Wahoo! Geocaching saved my life.

Nice trick. I'll file the serial numbers off of that one and keep it.

I can't remember how the "where am I" deal functions on a nüvi. I have actually used my nüvi 760 a couple of times to find caches when I was somewhere without my 78S and wanted to search. I held my finger down over the signal strength indicator (upper left on my unit) and it switched to the satellite page. Then I had to wander around and watch the coordinates change until they matched the cache coordinates. It was cumbersome but it worked. For the most part I tend to cache while on vacation anymore rather than locally. When I travel I send my pocket query to the 78S for full paperless caching but I also run a freebie macro in GSAK that formats the info nicely and then send it to my nüvi. That gives me the full cache info on the 760 in various colors for description, hint, logs, etc. We tend to use the nüvi for cache info and then use the 78S to actually locate the cache. In a pinch though, as I said above, I have used the nüvi itself to find caches. It's just not nearly as easy as following the arrow.

I used to use a Palm PDA. I bought cheap used ones on eBay. When I put them in my back pocket and sat on a rock it wasn't such a big disaster to hear that loud CRACK. These days I use a GPSMAP 78S. Full paperless caching. I use GSAK to load the full cache info into the unit. I love it.

Some people are finders and some are hiders. I have a friend who geocached for a brief period. He couldn't find his a** with both hands when looking for caches but he placed some very tricky-to-find caches. His cache hides would have been almost impossible to find if not for the fact that his coordinates were EXACT every time. He had the most consistently super-accurate coordinates I've ever seen. There are so many geocachers out there. I'm personally glad that many of them don't hide caches. Some folks hide a crazy amount of caches. I know of one who is fairly local who has 1,338 hides. Amazingly, he doesn't place crappy caches and he maintains all of his hides. Another cacher has more than 250 hides but many of them are placed "just because I can put a cache here" and they are rarely maintained. It all depends on the particular cache owner. I have placed 30 caches of varying quality. I placed a few that were, of themselves, pretty lame but they served a purpose as stages of a puzzle. The final has been stolen for the second time and I archived it. I will probably archive 4 of the 5 steps leading to the final as they aren't really "stand-alone" quality. Too many people place poorly thought out caches just because they can. I love it when I find a well thought out and innovative hide - especially one that takes me to a great spot.

I have to ask: WHY would you want the .LOC file rather than the .GPX file that has complete cache information?

Why in the world would you type in the coordinates on your GPS? Get a pocket query. Try out GSAK. You don't need to get fancy with it. Just drop the zipped file you get from the pocket query into GSAK and send it to your GPS.

Clear your browser cache. Clear your cookies. Close your browser. Open your browser. You will have to login because your info will be gone. It "should" remember you after that. Every once in a while I have to login again but not very often.

Try going to this page: http://www.geocachingadmin.com/ You can put in your user name on the right and customize it to your heart's content with links you find useful. On the left you can put in the name of the cache or the GC number of the cache and find it that way It's really quite a useful page.

I live on a cul-de-sac and we have a block breakfast every year. One of the retired neighbors came down to grab some food and when folks asked what he'd been up to lately he got a big grin and said, "Treasure Hunting!". The neighbors laughed and he told us a little bit about geocaching. The other neighbors laughed some more and poked a bit of fun but I thought it sounded interesting so I made sure to get the web address. I went home and made a geocaching.com account and started reading the forums. I read a LOT of useful stuff and then over the next week or so I started checking out GPS receivers online. I looked at a lot of different models and, the more I looked, the more I wanted it all. Finally one day I saw a GPSMAP 76CSx on eBay that was brand new in the box. The price was low so I sent myself email to check it out the next day. When I got to work the next day I got the email and looked it up and it was STILL low with 11 minutes left on the auction. I made a bid, certain it would jump to some really high price at the last minute. Boy was I surprised when I won! Then I had to go home and tell my wife I had just spent $400. At that time the thing would have cost me $632 locally though (with tax) so it was a good buy. By the time the unit arrived in the mail I had already read a zillion forum posts, tons of other online information, and The Complete Idiot's Guide to Geocaching and had gotten GSAK and downloaded a Pocket Query. I opened the box, checked out the unit for maybe 20 minutes, loaded my Pocket Query, and went out and found my first cache - an ammo can in a stump that had been hidden by the very neighbor who first told me about caching. I first heard the word Geocaching on July 30, 2005 and my first find was August 8, 2005. I love it! I had been an online gamer (Dark Age of Camelot) for 3 years and had wasted from 2 to 16 hours a day - every day - playing that stupid game. When I discovered geocaching I went outside and never gamed again. Geocaching saved my sanity.

Where would I not hide a cache? In about 60% of the places caches are currently being placed by newer cachers.

Aha! this is more along the lines of issue I'm trying to describe. When I load the information into the 60csx, I make the cache name visible and the cache code is in the comments field. If I create a GPX from the data stored in my 60csx, the data does not match the field name. I load caches into my 78S and my nüvi 760. Both give me the full cache information. I'm a premium member so I get .GPX files from pocket queries rather than .LOC files which don't contain all the information. When I drop my pocket query into GSAK I get ALL of the information. In my opinion .LOC files suck hard.

Caches at dumpsters = smilie + free lunch!

The ONLY problem I've had with ammo cans is the jerks who keep stealing them. I've had to archive two different caches. When the can is stolen I replace it ONCE. If it's stolen a second time I archive the cache. I've never had one leak. I did, however, find one that someone had placed that had a lot of rust inside it. The CO didn't even bother to clean the thing up. It was nasty.

Paperless..... I use the GPSMAP 78S. It does full paperless geocaching, accepts the maps, does full automotive routing, etc. I love it.

Wow. 2 pages of posts from 2007 and then suddenly posts from 2012. I'm 59

At one time I had every cache in my area logged. Then things changed. Instead of ammo cans everything being placed was suddenly a micro. Instead of caches in places where it was easy to search the new caches were suddenly being placed downtown where there are a zillion people all around or in parking lots right in front of the front door and window of businesses. Some were being placed in residential areas where neighbors would wonder what the heck you were doing there. As a result, there are now a LOT of geocaches in my area that I simply don't look for. It got to the point where I pretty much stopped geocaching in my home town because I just don't like to look for the majority of caches that are placed here anymore. Yes, there are some good caches still being placed but by now I'm out of the habit of even checking the new caches that come out because I just came to expect new caches here to be a micro in a place I didn't want to search. It's sad... If you aren't comfortable searching for caches in high muggle areas then simply don't look for them. Try to find caches that you are comfortable searching for. As others have said, try parks and rural areas.

This would be a good post to markwell.

This thread reminded me of a GREAT guardrail cache called Avant_"Guard" The cache has been archived but I went back to see if I had awarded it a favorite point when they came out. I was quite surprised to not find my log on the page anywhere! I wonder if I forgot to log the thing or what. It was a guardrail cache but it was definitely worth a favorite point. Not all guardrail caches are lame. (Now I have to try to figure out when I found the dang thing and log it properly. Time to dig back through my notes.) [Edit] Found my log in my "All Finds" database. It seems there are two caches of the same name by the same hiders! I edited the link above to point to the right cache - which does indeed have my log.