StripyJules

Nettles are normal in Britain but MAN are they big and plentiful this year! Places I regularly walk where the nettles are around hip-height in a normal year are nearly over my head this year, and thick, too; maybe this is why people are commenting on them more. We've been to a few caches lately, though, where it looks like people have got a bit irrational with the nettles and trampled around area pretty badly.

D:3, T: 1.5. Just struck us as a bit, well, ill-advised. If any other finder thought it odd they haven't said so; one, in his or her log, obliquely advises you to ignore the warning signs. For all we know that particular fence may never be "on" but that doesn't mean that others like it won't be and and it ain't much fun finding out one does have current! The hide is in an area of high tourist traffic with many non-locals passing through country that still has a lot of agriculture and therefore stock fences. Have seen a few other bisons-on-fences but none of them have been even possibly electrified.

Not a huge amount of experience here yet, but so far: a bison tube clipped to an electric fence. There was no current, but apparently nobody but me, my "country boy" other half and my dog (who has come across an electric fence before and NOT enjoyed the experience) thinks this is a bad idea.

Ooh can we play? We're a bit new but dog Sykes is up for it.

What an excellent place for a cache! A bit far away (we're in the UK) but we would have loved to have found that one. A couple of years ago (pre-geocaching for us) whilst out shopping for dog food we came across the cockpit of an old plane sitting in the car park of the pet food store, which was on the edge of an old WW2 USAF base. Noting its registration number from a photo we took, we spent an interesting evening on the internet tracing the plane's history, finding photos of it in various ownerships and roles and reading about its crashes, near-misses and trips back and forth across the Atlantic. We'd probably have done the same with this one! Shame she's gone (and the cache too). Do you know what the family plan to do with her?

Doesn't for me! You're not the first person to say this, Im just replying here as it's the last post to say it... It gives me two points - a red roundel thingummy, which is the nearest point of interest I guess, and a green arrow, which is the location. That's also where it centres and zooms on. As is shown in the screen shot I put up. Google isn't centered on the red target (that is just the nearest point Google has a note or entry for) but on the green arrow: the screen shot is cropped to reduce the image size for uploading. The green arrow is where you want to go!

Google Maps should look like this: Just copy the co-ordinates into the search box at the top next to the word "Google"; the green arrow pinpoints those coordinates on the map (in this case it's a cache local to me), the red marker is the nearest point that Google has some kind of entry for (postal address, nearest building, whatever).

Well, if you mark the location of your car or the entrance to the park or whatever, then once you've found the cache the car or park entrance or whatever just becomes the next place to find your way TO, right? Your answer may lie in the "obediently following my little arrow" part. The arrow and distance need only be glanced at occasionally to make sure you're still on the right track, while you keep your head up and make note of your surroundings. Keep your head buried in the GPS screen the whole time and when you finally look up you're bound to wonder how you got there. Have you ever ridden on a bus or a train but kept yourself busy with a book or a magazine the whole ride? Often when you finally look up, or the bus comes to a stop, you're surprised to realize where you are because you weren't paying attention to your surroundings as they went by. The same can happen while you're staring intently at a GPS screen. It happens all the time nowadays to people who have SatNav units in their cars...they obediently follow the directions and are basically teaching themselves NOT to think about where they are going. Then they drive off into ponds or get stuck on one-lane dirt roads or drive into restricted areas because "my GPS told me to". They get in a bad habit of letting the device do all the thinking and disengage their brains from the process, which is bad. Actually the first instance applies to life in general, not caching in particular! I've never put myself in the position - whilst caching - of not being able to easily retrace my steps or take a wayposted, circular route back to my starting point. "Following the arrow" has given me a bit more confidence to venture out but I know its - and my - limitations. It gets glanced at to check distance to the cache or to confirm which fork in the path, etc., but I'm not glued to it. As I said, I don't have a car satnav, so I'm not guilty of that one. I am capable of navigating using a map, and do so; I just can't get about using any inbuilt geographical sense. Not if I want to get there. Or back. To be fair, also, my lack of a sense of direction long predates any of this newfangled techno stuff!

Back to getting lost... I appear to be one of those unfortunates with no functioning sense of direction. I'm sure I used to have one, but where it's gone now - who knows! Based in the UK we don't have the real wilderness lands to contend with (though there are a few fairly serious wild bits still left) and if we did have, I wouldn't be going near them, or at least not alone. Oftentimes I can easily find my way TO somewhere, but not BACK. Even something as simple as attending a country show or similar will involve me turning the wrong way out of the gate when I leave and plunging into the unknown. This has happened so often it's become a "thing". I try to remember which way I turned when I drove in but still get it wrong far too often. Maybe it's genetic, as my mother is worse than me. I don't have a car satnav but I can (and do) read maps, so I can translate what I see on the page to what I'm driving or walking through and find my way about, but there's no inbuilt sense of "where I am" at all. My partner lives across the lane (literally, across the lane) from a small patch of woodland and he's been amazed by my ability to get lost in there and not find - or even recognise, if I pop out of the woods at an unexpected angle - the house again; he thinks I'm putting it on, but genuinely, I'm not. On trips out, friends say "I think it's this way!" and mean it, and are right. Me? Not once. I walk a lot with my dog and have a good memory for things like tree- and hedge-lines and silhouettes, but have to learn them over repeated visits, it doesn't happen instantly. As a new geocacher obediently following my little arrow I find myself wondering: can this sense be learned, or practiced and improved? Or am I doomed to be on the verge of "lost" forever?

I'm new to this so maybe the novelty will wear off, but at the moment I love reading logs. Is this somehow nerdy? Often, I'll pick interesting looking caches and sit and read their logs, rather in the way I imagine a gardener would look at seed catalogues if he can't be out there actually digging. Some of them I have no hope of ever finding myself, some are in areas I know well or may already have found. You see some really entertaining ones, and others where you can feel the pain! Row after row of "TFTC" is disappointing in that respect, specially if (1) you found the cache and there was definitely something special about it or (2) you're still trying to find the cache and are desperately looking for a hint, any hint; but I do understand that not everyone finds writing easy, either from the "expressing yourself" point of view (look how often forum posts are criticized for spelling or grammar) or because of the smartphone thing. I'm a smartphone user (can't stretch to a GPSr just yet) and they are awkward but it is possible to log with them. If I can find somewhere I can sit down, see my screen and it's not freezing or raining I'll do one on site; if not, the laptop comes out when I get home. I like to add photos sometimes, so it's the laptop for that, too. I always try to write something. "Sharing the experience" is part of it, isn't it?

That's your problem, you should not try to focus. You don't stare at the stereogram, you kind of relax your eyes and stare through it as if you are looking past it. It becomes a blur, then voila! It all suddenly comes into focus. Usually takes me a few minutes of staring before it happens. Nope. Just does not work for someone with cataract surgery. My plastic implants do not focus. They do not blur. They are set for 4 feet and beyond for the implants, and 24" for the bifocals. (24" being the distance to the computer screen. Hard time talking my ophthalmologist into that one!) The good news is that I went from 20/1200 to 20/20. The bad news is that I cannot decypher this sort of mystery cache. I can live with this! We were looking at one of these in Maine. My brother had a lens inplant for a carpentry accident. He cannot decypher these either. (Or maybe it's something hereditary?) He got a friend to solve it for us. We looked at the one in South Mountain. Neither of us can decypher that one either. (Fortunately, the CO took pity on me, and supplied me with the coords.) I can see things at 4' and beyond, and I can see things at 24". I cannot make anything out of this puzzle. Oh, well. But after fifty-some-odd years of complete blindness with out my glasses, I can now read the alarm clock without glasses!!!! Seems a small price to pay. I am blind in one eye (severe, congenital and inoperable cataract). Can't do these at all! No proper 3D vision. No depth perception, or only such as is "learned". I can't park straight either.

Thanks; that doesn't send, or maybe it's going to but hasn't yet. I think it must be an Orange UK issue. The email sent from my laptop/usual email address to my phone got me an alert (and weirdly, also an email failure notice), but the Groundspeak validation one just arrived as an email with no phone alert, which is kind of pointless. All the Orange settings I can tweak have been tweaked but I fear it isn't going to work. If anybody has managed to get it to work I'd appreciate knowing how; the Orange website is a horror!

Have you tried just sending a regular email to the address? That's an easy way to test if you've got the right address or not. I have - and I got an "alert" message on my phone with the email address of the sender, the subject of the email (but not the text of it) and an invitation to ring a number to have the email read to me. Went back and resent the validation email from Groundspeak, and got nothing to my phone as the instructions say, though the email appears in my Orange inbox. Am peering at settings now to see what might be wrong.

Sorry to resurrect an old thread: but does anyone in the UK know if Orange actually still offer this (email-to-SMS) service? I have set things up on Groundspeak.com using the instructions as given here, but didn't receive the verification email. A search through the Orange website didn't come up with anything; there's an area to set up an @orange.net email address but when I tried this (thinking I may need to set something up at the Orange end too) it told me that "the alias is not correct". I dread speaking to their callcentre! I do have and use (and cache with) a smartphone which has email capability, but for reasons of battery conservation, 3G data usage when away from wireless and speed, I have it set to only pick up emails when I ask it to. So I rather like the idea of getting a notification by text which I can then follow through.

I have mobility issues (I'm not in a chair, but have other difficulties) and am a newbie too. So far only two caches have been literally unobtainable to me when I got to GZ and there wasn't anything about tricky access on the cache owner's pages. It didn't make me mad but it was disappointing. In one case I wrote a note to say I'd found the cache but was physically incapable of getting to it and the cache owner added an attribute to his page and offered to accompany me to the cache to help me reach it, which is very kind of him though I've not yet taken up his offer. Also, when caching with my partner, if we make a find which because of its situation or whatever I would have had difficulty with or not been able to access on my own, I will say so in my log. Sometimes you can have easy terrain on the way to a cache but a steep bank or high reach or something once you get there which can make things harder. Conversely, the terrain can be flat or not difficult by others' estimations but be very difficult for me; deep mud can make a route impassable for me and if such a route to a cache pops up I will always mention it in the hope it helps others who are less mobile make a decision whether to try for the cache or not.

We had a query about this. Recently found - and logged - a cache, but it felt wrong, so said so in my log. It was a bison tube clipped to a wire stock fence bearing warning signs that the fence was electrified. Having seen the way my poor dog reacted when he got a belt off an electric fence a few months back, and having the dog with us on the trip this time, we had kept well away from the fence. Plus, my partner is a real country boy and knows when not to mess with stuff. Puzzled with not finding, we read previous logs which hinted that the cache was, in fact, on the fence. It turned out the current wasn't on. But what if it is next time somebody searches? Or somebody searches a similar location elsewhere with a live fence? We just didn't think it was, as we say round here, big or clever. But we were the only people to comment on this in the logs (apart from one person remarking on the "yellow red herrings", meaning the warning signs) so maybe we're the only ones bothered or this is a common thing? We're relative newbies, but we're told to think "Where would you hide the cache?"; well, not on an electric fence, actually...