vds

I don't think so. Knee high when I did it maybe a month ago.

Wow - that's a big number. I'm up to 7672 sayeth the macro, FWIW.

Really. My 10-year old, 19,000+ miles TB got dropped in a 4/4 ATV-only place somewhere in Arizona http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=de340717-61aa-42a2-afdb-f09e896b146c

Yup. I have custom queries that due to the 5-per-day limit take 6 days to run with all caches I haven't found, that aren't crazy exotic (filter out mountain climbs, scuba, boats required and events, and my ignore list). Once you build your queries by date and seed your GSAK database, it takes far far less to keep it up to date since you can refresh 6000 per day with the full updates form. Other than running all the queries a couple times a year, the only sustaining maintenance is to run a query of 'all new caches in the last 30 days' query every 3-4 weeks to keep the list full, then use the 'refresh' function when I feel like it (unless I have a trip coming). Since I have date-based PQs, I can jumpstart the updates by 11,000 per day by running 5,000 worth of date-based-queries, and then filtering in GSAK based on date hidden and running 6,000 worth of refreshes (although the refresh method is really slow for I guess 'bot throttling reasons).

Sad but understand. It's been a nice goal for several years for me to try to visit all the counties in WA (just the same handful far-east to go, still) and this has been a nice way to keep track of things. Still hoping to get the three days to knock them off before you hand the keys over on this one. I've had several nice overnight trips and days playing hooky from work on this one so far. Great stuff ! FWIW, I know it's your challenge, meaning you can define it your way, but I always wondered if the methodology is a bit passe' and needlessly strict+complicated nowadays: At a minimum, it sure has always seemed labor-intensive for you based on my reading. I wonder if some tweaks in the rules might keep the fun and remove the pain/time. The following are just some thoughts that leap to mind: you require registering before starting. Seems a bit onorous to the user, and painful for you to keep track of for no particularly good reason I can think of. you require folks to update in a note (add a note, not edit a note) as they proceed county by county. That's a pain for us as seekers, and it has to be a pain for you to read. I can see how periodic updates in a relatively long-time-to-complete challenge would provide you as the owner nice feedback that folks still are working on it, but that might be doable with 'requesting' rather than 'requiring' folks to update things periodically. I suspect enough folks would do so that you'd still know folks are interested in this one. proving validity of eligibility can now be done by a GSAK macro. I can think of at least two macros that would do the job. I do that with my Blanche's Blackout Challenge. If folks would work that hard to falsely claim they've found a cache placed on all 366 days of the year, I'm not going to worry it as the hider. the cache could of course be moved off private property, or to some other cooperating cacher's property if that's the big problem and you could of course always publish the final location if requests were driving you crazy (incidentally, thank you for answering my email last year regarding which county the final is in, helped lots in confirming I wanted to do it) That said, I'm still going to find a way to cache in all the states and fill out my map and I greatly appreciate the cache and where I've travelled thus far getting to 31 counties. I know I will not attempt the DeLorme Challenge for a variety of reasons but this one is a nice step up from the King County Thomas Challenge that kept me busy a couple years ago. Certainly hope it sticks around indefinitely. Thanks.

I oppose people who oppose things. For me, my Premium hides were an attempt to give 'paying' members a chance to get there first as a thanks for supporting the site that the 'non-paying' users were using. In general I'd leave them premium only for a while to get the initial FTF frenzy over then open them for all. I also had a scenario where some of the FTF crazies were not paying members, so making the caches PM only gave others a try at FTF. With the days of smartphone immediate notification of new caches, the FTFers got even more nutso around my area, so I basically gave up trying to have them not take all the fun from the newbies.

You could score the Western PA variant of Who's Buried in Wayne's Tomb(s) - http://coord.info/GC9B8E

In the US, the nice folks at Cache Advance can do this too...

Three weeks is nothing. Relax. I've had very good luck sending polite email to folks who appear to have my TBs in their possession and 'all' of them who responded were very nice and dropped the bugs promptly. A few folks have even mailed the tag back to me when they've found the cache destroyed and only the tag left sitting there as trash. What I do is email something along the lines of "hi - it appears you've had my XXXXX TB in your possession for YYYY weeks. Would it be possible for you to either drop it in a local cache or alternately drop it in the mail to me in the near future ?". I did have one guy who was obstinate/nasty in response. What I did in that case was change the name of the TB to "THIS BUG STOLEN BY <their_name_here>" which of course showed up on their profile page every time they logged in. Pretty funny - it was quietly dropped in a cache within a week :-)

I've found 43 over the 10 years, but the percentage stolen is amazingly high. I released 3 coins over the years. All are goners. - one lasted 24 months til nov-07, 32 drops, 865 miles - one lasted 27 months til oct-08, 36 drops, 24300 miles (West Coast, Hawaii, Japan, East Coast) - one lasted 6 months til apr-06, 17 drops, 3500 miles I quit releasing coins when the local Seattle/Tacoma theft problem got beyond ridiculous. When I find them these days unless I'm planning on traveling someplace 'far' away and can get them some miles, I tend to just 'discover' them rather than move them (figuring they're safer where I find them if I actually find one around here), but occasionally I'll move one if it's very cool and I can bring it home to show the family. In general, I try to log "the TB or coin is not in the last reported cache" when I notice one supposedly there is missing so the owner at least knows it's possibly a goner. I have a PQ for local caches containing trackables and once in a while I'll check one if an interesting coin is allegedly there. It's probably been a few years since any actually were present. Sigh.

There is only one Four Corners. I still want to go there, sounds so cool to stand on the marker regardless of caching. If you want to score a lot of states, I'd suggest Southwest Air to BWI between Washington and Baltimore. You could 'easily' do PA, NJ, DE, MD, VA, DC, and maybe even WV and OH without stressing too much if you extended your trip toward Pittsburgh. There are many dozen wonderful virtual caches in DC that are well worth a couple days alone there. You could also go to Boston and do MA, CT, RI, ME, VT, NH and possibly NY in a big loop. I think I figured out once that a loop starting in Boston would score MA, CT, RI, NH, VT in only 300 or so miles of driving.

Any phone on a major carrier can text. I know because my family got force-upgraded a few years back. And going geocaching without at least one person having a phone is a supremely risky situation. Plus not everyone HAS to find every cache.Figuring out how to text on my 9yr old phone would be more puzzling then the puzzle. Yeah, me too, but my phone is only a couple of years old--but it's as close as we could find to my 10-year-old prior version. I only have a phone because it's provided by work, and it's a standard phone and we don't even text on it (as those charges will show up in the company statement). Plus, the one time I attempted to text, it took forever to write a sentence no more complicated than this one I'm typing right now. It's amazing how many people assume that everyone has a "smart phone." Outside the internet chat rooms and forums, you know out there with the common masses, being low tech is the norm. Perhaps texting is not as much of the norm as I suspected. Either way, I would like to create this cache, of course alluding to texting in the hint. Any thoughts on a difficulty rating? I was thinking 3 or 4 but since this will only be my 2nd puzzle placement I'm still new at this. I'd call it a 2 max difficulty. White on white is nothing new. You're going to have to give them enough info to know they need to text (not call) the number. Texting is trivial these days. I did one last year where you had to call a phone number that you figured out the hard way after many steps and technologies needed in which they did a Google Voice mailbox message. Pretty cool, although I was pretty chicken regarding calling a long distance number, but I finally figured what the heck and went for it. Very fun. I would think an email to your local reviewer with what you want to do would possibly be wise, before you spend too much work setting something up that they might think wasn't approvable. FWIW, it seems like a reasonable enough plan for them to approve it but given the ever-changing rules here, it might be helpful to ask your reviewer(s) in advance.

And since you're local, plan out your day to qualify for http://coord.info/GC2ZM06 when you get back. There's a virtual just across the border in MT on I-90, so you just need two different types of caches in WA (rest stop quickies along the way) and ID (there are lots of options just across the border).

I'm on a 13" Macbook White which and I have to scroll down to get to the login screen. Why logout ? Security, I always run with Private Browsing mode in Firefox, not that I need to justify the why, but I'd thought I'd answer The http://www.geocaching.com/my/default.aspx screen that takes me to my home page has far too vertical a structure for anything remotely close to a modern laptop which tends to have a more horizonal/DVD-format aspect ratio. There is no technical reason that TPTB couldn't tweak their orientation to make the home screens more laptop friendly.

We have a couple Nuvi 1300s and use the Aussie Woman's voice. Yes, the GPS units are called "old Sheila" and "new Sheila". (best thing is Washington roads such as WA Rte 18 are spoken as Western Australia Route 18)

"Power Trails" - basically a road or route with a cache every 0.1 mile - there's one that used to be near Las Vegas that had over 1000 caches and teams of folks would do a 24-hour cache-a-thon to get them all. There are a bunch of them, look the term up on the forums.

And you have to figure in the time value of the increased cost to get the hybrid variant as well. The dealers are still insanely marking them up in most cases. When I got my 2005 Civic commuter car (32.5 mpg in 138k miles thus far) I did the math comparing that car versus the same car in hybrid form (43 mpg so they said). The math came out to break even over 120k miles if I drove 20k/year at $4/gallon. At the time, I thought "gas will never be that high" and "I'll never drive that much" so I passed. So much for my math. I drove 19k/year for 7 years and we all know where gas is now. Remember those high mpg variants if they're cars tend to have harder/louder/rougher tires that folks replace with softer/quieter tires a few years into ownership. That'll drop a couple mpg off your totals. From 34 to 32.5 mpg, no biggie. From 23 to 20, bigger deal. When I do my SE WA road trip at the end of the month, I'm probably taking the Outback for comfort. Even if I drive 1000 miles circling the state, the difference in cost is about $50 versus the Civic, which is less than the chiropractor I'd need if I took the commuter car :-)

(wow - glad you're ok) Agree with the pro-Outback comments. Best gas mileage of the big name SUVs. Lasts forever. Good ride. Nice and quiet. I have a 2000 Outback with 110k miles and it's a nice ride if you can afford the lousy (24 max) mileage. I did a FW -> Cheyney and back trip in Dec'2010 in it in a 15 hour day watching Villanova lose (sigh) to CWU in the National Semis and it was plenty comfy enough to do that, have a conversation in the car without going deaf, and be able to walk at the end of a 600 mile day. I had a loaner 2011 a year ago for a week and it was 'much' nicer in every way. Smoother. Quieter. Far better mileage. Far nicer ride. You might want to try some rentals and short trips. I had a rental Ford Escape and it was a very nice car, but mileage was terrible, well under 20. The RAV4 was surprisingly nice, with a little better mileage in the same combined local/highway traffic. Everybody I know with a CRV loves it. But the 2011 Outback I had for a week was 'really' nice. Very nice ride. That would be first on my list to look into if the 2000 got hit by a meteor or something.

sigh - almost two weeks later and map performance is BEYOND horrible. Unusable.

In trying to figure out how to get GSAK to automatically use the new corrected coordinates feature, I stumbled across this GSAK presentation from a cacher in NH. Great stuff. Learned a lot about how to do polygons drag'n'drop. http://www.exploristforum.com/index.php?option=com_jdownloads&Itemid=60&task=view.download&catid=7&cid=7 I also found reference to a nice macro "myGMEv3" for using Google maps to plan a caching day. http://gsak.net/board/index.php?showtopic=5477&st=0& Not quite as good as Travis's S+T method for planning a cache machine, but sure works great as a quick filter and first pass to get an initial set of candidates. I very much liked the linkage with GSAK where you highlight the cache on the map and can click on it to set the user flag in GSAK (presumably to do a later download of just flagged/targeted caches or the like). Cool stuff.

Totally disagree. There is a big difference between running a business and therefore trying to deal with an emerging big cost from one of your previously affordable suppliers vs. "greed" by any definition. I'm not a big fan of the map change either, but it's not that big a deal. The little dynamic maps still show google, meaning I can get to satellite and street view when scoping caches, so the big map change is a minor annoyance at worst (assuming the performance starts recovering toward what it was before).

Sno-Parks are separate because they are mandated to be 100% self-funded. Everything else can be covered with a Interagency Pass (federal) and a Discover Pass (state). A NW Forest Pass might be a better choice than the Interagency Pass if you don't need the extra coverage for National Parks, etc. Wow - first time I've heard the maze (mess) of passes explained clearly. Thanks ! Here are some links: http://www.discovernw.org/store_annual-northwest-forest-pass-national-forests-in-washington-and-oregon-only_09942.html http://www.blm.gov/wo/st/en/prog/Recreation/recreation_national/recreation_fees__/interagency_pass.html http://discoverpass.wa.gov/ Forest pass is $30, Interagency is $80, and the Discover Pass for WA state parks is $35. Looks like if you're 62 the Senior pass for $10 rather than the Interagency is a heck of a deal. Just as a comparison FWIW, a quick look says Mt.Rainier is $15 to enter once, the Johnston Ridge center at Mt.St.Helens is $8. The annual pass for Rainier is $30. Geez there are a lot of passes.

Perhaps you might ask Groundspeak the question of why they require that permission. It's usually good form for an app author to explain 'why' and not just tell you accept or don't use it. Use the talk to Groundspeak forum for the app and ask the question or alternately email them directly as suggested above (and make sure somebody actually answers).

I'd suggest spending the money on a Zagg screen cover. That's what you're most likely to scratch up.

I have never experienced that on my 2006 Macbook or my 2009 Mac Mini, but I'd "suspect" you either ran out of memory, or your virtual disk is full as the first things to look into if you really wanted to dig further. I've had to grow my virtual disks a couple times over the years as I've kept the system up to date with updates. Windows gets freaky when the disk is close to full. I've been up to 25,000 caches in my all-of-WA database with zero problems under Bootcamp FWIW on a 2GB 2006 Macbook running Win7 (32 bit). There are at least three virtualization possibilities: - Parallels (about $40) - VMware Fusion (about $40) - or bootcamp (free, comes with OS/X) In all cases you need the Windows license, but I'm guessing most people are awash in XP licenses at a minimum. You can sometimes find a student or home deal that gets the price down to $30 or so. I did my Win7 systems as educational updates over XP way back when. If you're near Redmond WA, find a friend who works for Micro$oft to do a little company store visit on their prices. A case of beer can get you some nice discounts :-) Anyway, I've run them all and do virtualization for much of my day job, but at home I switched to bootcamp for USB related issues. For some reason when I went to Win7 SP1 the virtual systems got stupid and wouldn't mount the GPS which is of course important for downloading PQs and processed databases. Bootcamp fixed that issue for both the Oregon and the Nuvi. If you're paying $80 for Fusion, you're getting ripped off. Price is $40 on Amazon. Parallels is $65 on Amazon for (to me) an equivalent product. If you don't like one, they both do the competitive discount thing. My Fusion was purchased that way for $20. But bootcamp is free if the money matters that much, once you have the Windows license in hand of course.