mongoosehide

There's a multi in Afghanistan that is supposed to be 17 stages. a fellow cacher and I would take breaks over several days apart (sometimes weeks) to work on this one. We plugged the coordinates into my laptop to plot out how the trek went. You were definitely ponging all over the base, but a lot of the stages brought you to places you wouldn't necessarily know about until way further in your deployment there. Besides, it broke up the monotony of day-in, day-out routines. The owner even placed a little prize for cachers at all the stages (one prize for a person at each stage... and he even asked people to not take a prize from a later stage if grabbed one from an earlier stage), and you could tell how many people tried by how the prizes were still there at the much later stages.The only bad part was that a couple of the stages went missing, and we had to email the owner to let me know. (It wasn't always muggles, construction is a constant state of business out there). Well, the last day that I was in country, we headed out, with the latest coordinates from the owner (yes, a stage went missing), and I was expecting to find the typical stage, but we landed smack dab right on the final stage. That was a thriller, especially for being my last day in country. Great, now I am going off-topic. Ok, so I guess I'm saying that if the multi-ponging has a reason (unique sites, something to keep you occupied, do something interesting), then it shouldn't be bad.

Our first FTF had a Geocaching Shirt as the Prize. That was great, and I wore it to the first event we attended two months later. Since then, we've been FTF on two others, and we're drumming up ideas and themes for a cache (or two). A certificate is nice, but we're looking at putting in a Challenge coin. Heck, we may do both.

Well, you can find them on the website. For your example, go the the cache in the park that you know, click the map link, then click "list archived" and "identify." You get an image and list of all the caches (including archived) in that area of the map. Thanks for the tip. I checked it out this morning, and it is what we're looking for. --Will

I'd like to see an archived search feature, but make it a member only feature in the pocket query, if everyone is worried about it returning results in the normal search on the website. My wife and I are planning on putting out some caches (finally), and we'd like to see areas to avoid. I know a lot of caches get archived because of safety concerns or permissions being revoked and what-not, but there are the occassional muggles stealing them too. I know of one park that has had two caches (maybe more) stolen in it, and it's because of that reason that we would like to see an "archived cache search" feature. The only reason I know about the stolen caches is because one was stolen a few days after I found one, and I checked the history of previous cachers in the area to see what caches they had found. I had to grab the coordinates and plot them in my mapsource program to see them practically overlap. So far, in my manual history digging through local cachers' geocaching pages, I've found a couple of caches that were archived because of theft. It's those areas we want to avoid, or at least, use a different size container so as to not recreate another opportunity for non-geocachers. Now that I've said that, someone will probably tell me about an easier way to find archived caches on the website, or through the pocket queries... --Will

I might be missing something in all this since I use my laptop with the .loc files, but I see all the info I need from the .loc when viewing it with my Mapsource software as I do with the .gpx files. Of course, I don't have a PDA and that's, I'm told, is where all the difference is. I am comtemplating getting a PDA, especially considering we tried our first paperless cache hunt this weekend with my "bulky laptop. --Will