FishieFive

We buy most of our swag at Ben Franklin craft store out of the clearance department. I can usually find pendants, really cool glass beads, etc. Things that are good in wet caches (Oregon + winter = wet caches everywhere). One of our favorite ones to find was filled with old necklaces. Garage sale stuff probably, buy my daughter had a blast sorting them out and picking one. There were probably 15 necklaces inside, each in a ziplock bag. They were mostly gaudy beaded necklaces from the 70s, but it was unique and fun.

There are 4 of us in our caching team (i.e. the family) and we are Christians. Christians use the Ichthus, or fish, as a symbol. Somehow we made that into the FishieFour! It fits us well enough. Also closely tied to how much we like goldfish crackers.

We went to a craft store and bought a bag of really cool glass beads. They're lovely and won't be ruined if they get wet. Small enough to hide in most caches, but large enough to be a cool item. We got the idea from a bead cache where all of the tradeables were beads. I'm thinking of collecting bead tradeables and making a bracelet or something. I got them on sale so they ended up being about 25 cents each.

Oy, you're right, that's a lot worse. How frustrating! This one also had a tag attached, clearly stating the mission. Did you ever get yours back?

I'm new to geocaching, but I've read up on how to log and drop TBs. I swear, though, some cachers haven't bothered and it drives me nuts. We found a TB that wanted to go to London. We dropped it in a TB motel near the highway. It was picked up and within a few days made its way into a TB motel next to an international airport. We were thrilled, knowing it was close to going overseas, maybe even right to London. I checked on it today to see if it made it over or not...instead I found that an experienced cacher (over 6000 finds) moved it out of the airport cache and to some random location 20 miles away. I'm so irritated. It's not my bug, but I was proud that we were able to help it move closer to its goal. Why would an experienced cacher move a bug farther away from its goal?

This exactly happened to us today. By the time we realized there were LOTS of trails, it was raining and our kids were tired. We'll try again, with long pants (cut my legs to ribbons) and go off trail following gps rather than the trail.

Are you using the full app or the free version? If you're using the free version, it only shows you about 10% of caches. The full app shows all of them. We use iPhones and all the caches show up for us in our area. I know because I look at maps first at home to scout out good places (our area is micro-saturated and my kids hate micros). I've never found any missing.

We tried to convert my mother-in-law the other day. Massive Fail. I've never seen anyone more miserable.

We're in Oregon where it rains a LOT. So far we've found 16 caches (we only started April 1) and I think 15 have been wet. It's just wet all the time here. But for the most part, the contents are fine, just damp. Only one or two have been truly nasty inside. I guess we just expect it out here.

That is AWESOME! I'm in Oregon, but I do have a caching friend in Florida. I'm going to send her the cache name and see if it's close enough to her that she could go find it. So cool!

I didn't read all 150+ responses, but here's my question... We're new to caching and we've found our first TBs. After some trial and error, I did get them correctly logged. My husband wants to mail one to my brother who caches in Missouri, and one to a friend who caches in Florida. Is this okay? I told him I refused to mail them out until I could ask. By reading through these posts, I gather that my brother and my friend would each "grab" the respective TBs from us, then they would place them in caches in their own states. Kosher? No?

We started geocaching on April 1. We have two kids, ages 5 y and 10 m. Our 5yo is really having a lot of fun so far. We've logged 5 finds and 1 dnf. There are SO MANY caches near our home! I'm shocked at how many there are! Anyway, will be lurking around here for a little while getting a feel for things.