Otter and Lemur

A travel bug of mine had made it almost all the way to its specified goal in Vermont, USA, when a cacher intentionally decided to derail it and take it to the Netherlands instead -- he decided this would be more "interesting". The bug is currently in the Den Deijl cache, cache GCF2BA (visit the cache here). I would be grateful if anyone reading this would be so kind as to go retrieve it and mail it to me in the USA; I'll happily reimburse you for the postage and send you a thank-you gift as well. The bug in question is "Lemurcoin 2004", TBFEDC. -- My thanks to anyone who might be able to be of help. -- Lemur (Jay Furr), 1/2 of the "Furrs" geocaching team

Sometimes I wish we did get to fine the serious idiots who don't take basic precautions for their own safety (like the ice fishermen the Coast Guard has to rescue from Lake Champlain every spring), but in all seriousness, everyone slips up and does dumb things now and then. I've gone out caching solo in what I thought were reasonable conditions only to find that I was coming down with something, exhausting myself, running out of water, in way-too-snowy-and-cold temperatures, and if I'd been just a little more the worse for wear, I'd have needed rescue. I learned from that one, but... hindsight is 20-20. -- Lemur (1/2 of "Otter and Lemur" aka "furrs")

Something I wish more people considered when using find/not find/note -- and I think this's been said a time or two in this thread, but this is the critical thing for me: a find tells the cache owner that the cache is okay, it's there, it's reachable and findable. A DNF says the opposite may be true. A DNF says the cache owner may have something to worry about -- MAY. I was accused, briefly, a week or two ago of playing some form of statistical gamesmanship when I stated that I wasn't posting a DNF on a cache that I only visited the area of but didn't actually search for. I saw that there was three feet of snow on the ground and said "I've dug under enough snow today, I'll come back in a month." When I told the person questioning my actions my reasoning (that I didn't want to alarm the owner by posting a DNF) he said "oh, that makes sense." (Parenthetically, I've posted two DNFs recently and had the owners show up a few days later and say "you're right, the cache is gone, I'm archiving it, thanks.") On the flip side, I've seen a local guy recently posting "found, but forgot to sign the logbook, d'oh!" for some local caches and I have my suspicions. I was out in the cold hunting some of the same caches and found the vicinity of one that he'd allegedly found a month earlier (when there was a LOT more snow and ice on the ground) to be completely encased in ice and snow. I mean, SERIOUS ice and snow. And even after using the hint I had to conclude "it's encased in there somewhere." Yet, this novice cacher posted a month earlier that the cache was found just hunky-dory. As a cacher, I now am wondering "a) if HE was able to find it when there was MUCH MORE ice and snow about, why the heck can't I?" and " should I keep at this when it's entirely possible the other cacher was fibbing and it's not reachable this time of year?" I realize that the latter example only tangentially applies to the SAR team guy who started this thread. But my reason for bringing it up is this: if he doesn't KNOW the cache was there, but was only theoretically close to it according to his GPSr, by posting a find he could be misleading a fellow cacher into hunting forever for a cache that'd actually been plundered or muggled or something. So my rule of thumb is: don't post a "FOUND" unless you know for a fact that you were able to get to the cache, open it, and sign the logbook. And don't post a "DNF" unless you're dang sure that you actually really searched. -- Lemur (1/2 of "Otter and Lemur" aka "furrs")

We found ours, more or less. Unfortunately, circumstances surrounding our first find sort of soured us on caching for a while. The "Stimson Ledges" cache had been placed months earlier by someone who I don't think ever came back online, and by the time we got to it, crows dwelling on the ledges had pecked the container to pieces to see if there was any food inside it. But, obviously, we didn't know what we were in for when we set out. We were new to caching and headed valiantly off for the cache even though it was on top of a mountain... and the trails weren't what you could call easy to follow. Bushwhacking up a mountain when you expected to find logging roads to follow is now old hat for us (well, sort of) but it wasn't what I'd led my wife to expect. Bad things happen when you mislead my wife into doing something that turns out to be far more than she was let in for. When we finally reached the ledges in question, there was no container per se. Just shards of plastic, a few random pieces of weather-worn cache bait, and a signature item (a painted rock) from earlier visitors. We took the rock and left stuff we hoped wouldn't blow away; we kind of piled everything back into a heap and put a branch or something on top of it all (later on someone replaced the container). Then we turned and trudged back down the mountain, and were pretty hot and tired by the time we got back to our car. Unfortunately for our continued pursuit of the hobby, my having picked such a difficult cache for our first cache, not to mention finding the container in the condition it was in (obliterated) kept the experience from positively impressing my wife and we didn't go caching again for over a year. Had we picked a neat little local cache in a park or something it'd probably have struck my wife as more of a worthwhile pursuit, but in May of '02, there really weren't that many local caches at all in our neck of the woods. C'est la vie.

IMHO, the travel bugs FAQ page needs to be reworked in more ways than just "don't put the number of your bug on your bug's page." This isn't criticism of the admins. It's more a sigh in regards to the people who can't or won't read the existing TB help pages. My particular "bee in my bonnet "is people who just absolutely don't understand how to log a bug, how to drop off a bug, or why they should log or drop it off in the first place. I know I'm irrational on this point... but I really wish there was a URL on every travel bug tag that took the user directly to a very VERY simple and short and to the point explanation of what bugs are about and how they work, with links off that page for "how to log that you have a bug", "how to drop off a bug", and so on. With screen shots and the works. But, since we live in a culture were we have to print "do not use in the bathtub or near running water" on electric curling irons and hair dryers and soldering irons, I'm sure that there's really no level of detail or elegant simplicity that will for once and for all eliminate confusion regarding how bugs work, so please take my grumble as a grumble and not actual deluded bitching. I know the difference. -- Lemur (1/2 of "furrs")

This may have been asked before, but if not... Could we get official geocaching.com golf balls added to the items available in the store? I think it'd add a lot to the experience of opening an ammo box and finding a golf ball inside with all the other cache bait if the golf ball was an official Groundspeak one with the geocaching logo on it. -- Lemur

Peeve: bugs that are still listed in caches, cachers who keep saying "Didn't see bug X in the cache, what a pity, came all the way here hoping to find it", bug owners who've been told repeatedly by various people that the bug is gone, bug owners who nonetheless never get around to marking the bug missing. It would be nice if, as a cache owner, you could 'eject' a bug from your cache if you've been there and you're 100% certain that it's not there. Of course, if someone picked it up a few days ago and simply hasn't had a chance to get home to a PC and log it, that could cause confusion too, but otherwise I wish this was doable. If you pick a 25-mile radius around my home coordinates, there're about 12 caches with bugs, of which about a third aren't actually there and haven't been there for a long, long time. I'd love to see that cleaned up, but in most cases the bug owners never respond to mail and I don't like to pester someone via e-mail more often than, say, once every two months to report something to them like "your bug is gone, here's how you can mark it missing."

We're getting it too, have been all evening.

Greetings, all. I wouldn't normally do this, but... I'm a Vermont (USA) geocacher who, a thousand miles from home in the mid-USA city of St. Louis, found a travel bug that really needs to get to the UK by May. Around here, in Vermont, travel bugs don't really start to travel until the snow melts in April, and even then, they have this odd tendency to head willy-nilly to Boston and then sort of go in circles. So, this once, given the particular circumstances of said bug, I'd like to find some helpful UK geocacher and *mail* it to them. I think the fact that it won't be hand-carried across the Atlantic on a vacation trip will be more than outweighed by the fact that it'll be waiting for the original owners when they arrive in May for their 10th wedding anniversary, hoping to find the bug. Can some experienced English geocacher e-mail me and volunteer their name and mailing address so I can help this bug to its destiny? Thanks, Jay Furr Richmond, Vermont jfurr@furrs.org

Hi! Our travel bug, Floyd the Giant Day Gecko, is in the "get your kicks on route 93 "wendover"" geocache just west of Wendover, and needs to cross Nevada and travel on to San Francisco. The cache our bug is in appears to be very rarely visited. We would be greatly in debt to anyone who could visit the cache and move the bug on westwards! -- Otter and Lemur (Richmond, Vermont)

quote:Originally posted by Jamie Z:

quote:Originally posted by adondo:Ha! That would’ve been a good idea! It does give me another idea though… how about an old, bald truck tire with a TB attached inside? You could fling one out and the average Geomuggles would just think it was ordinary litter. It would drive (pun intended) a Geocacher crazy as they circled the old tire while looking at their GPS screen until they figured out that the tire they’ve repeatedly thrown aside while looking for the cache, IS the cache! One cache around where we live involves a stage where a micro is hidden inside a tire swing at a public park. I suppose if you were reasonably sure that a tire wasn't likely to be picked up and moved by some well-meaning cacher with CITO instincts, you could do something similar with a regular tire down in a gulch somewhere.

I, on the other hand, come down on the side of "don't completely sabotage a bug's goal." There's a particular travel bug whose goal was to reach the North Pole. Clearly, this isn't going to happen, but three times now it's crept up the East Coast and gotten almost to the Canadian border, in one case actually making it across the border and all the way to Montreal, and in each case some cretin has picked up the item and taken it back to, oh, southern New Jersey, or Cape Cod, or what-have-you. In the most recent leg of the bug's journeys, we even took a special trip with the bug to drop the bug in Vermont's northernmost cache. The bug crept into Quebec and was doing fine a few weeks after we dropped it off, until a guy picked it up and intentionally took it back south, way the heck south. He knew of the goal because the bug's Ziploc bag had the printout inside, and he even acknowledged that he knew that he was screwing things up when he posted his log, but he did it ANYWAY. Sigh. -- Lemur (Jay)

quote:Originally posted by flask:used to be you could get a listing of all your TBs organized by either distance travelled or dat, or name... is that gone? i liked that. and maybe i'm just nosy, but can we get that for other people's TBs too? we can get listings of other people's caches. Yeah, we were able to, and then it inadvertently got broken. But it's back. If you bring up a profile, displaying the number of owned bugs, caches, benchmarks, gopherlike beings, and so on, and then click right on the icon in question (e.g., to see a list of travel bugs, you click on the bug icon), you'll see said list. And if you click on the underlined column headings in the report, the list resorts itself. You can sort by name of the bug, date the bug was released, and distance the bug has traveled. I tried it just now and it worked. However, what DIDN'T work was clicking on the icon for travel bugs FOUND. When I click the little bug icon for found bugs, it brings me to the master travel bug page, not to the list of bugs I've found. Likewise, I was able to bring up your profile (the horror! the horror!) and display your list of OWNED bugs and such and sort them and stuff, but I was NOT able to bring up a list of bugs you've found. It's probably a minor tweak to the page that needs to be carried out. Nothing major; Jeremy was apparently able to fix this quickly last time. All hail Jeremy; send him cans of sauerkraut, jars of pickled cabbage, and mighty slabs of back bacon.

Well, I've asked them several times, but no luck so far. I suppose anything's possible, though.

quote:Originally posted by hydee:They have all been moved to an "unknown location". Could you also move TB773B to the unknown location? The first finder on that cache (Otter) found it completely empty (the cache is in a public area), and no subsequent finder has turned up any sign of the TB. Thanks!

quote:Originally posted by hydee:They have all been moved to an "unknown location". Thank you very much.

The following travel bugs aren't in their caches any more. As I am not the owner of these bugs, I cannot move them to the travel bug graveyard. I think it's pretty evident that they're gone, but I'll leave it up to Jeremy and company -- in my opinion it's time to put them into limbo. TB466A TB1FD TB5386 TB1110

quote:Originally posted by Pixie_Tracker:Anyone ever bought anything from Cafepress then to say how good these shirts are? Or ever bought this particular item? I checked out the "larger view" on one the shirts and it looks like the image quality is good, but I wonder if the final product is the same? I don't want to get one and then have to force people to take the FTF!! I personally have been very happy with the quality of the printing on items I've purchased from cafepress. Other folks I've anecdotally heard of have not liked the printing quality, but I don't know whether the items they bought had good art uploaded in the first place. If they foolishly bought items where the uploaded art was a low-res bitmap that had been converted to a JPG file, little wonder it might not come out all that pretty. When you upload a high-high-resolution JPG, the quality of the resulting art has been all that I could ask for.

quote:Originally posted by tinkerwink:I just started Geocaching a couple weeks ago. Yesterday I went to a cache that had been pirated? I tried the web site but nothing comes up. What is this all about? When you say 'pirated', do you mean it was empty, ransacked by geomuggles or animals, or was it actually empty/gone and with a note from some self-described "pirate" mocking you?

quote:Originally posted by flask:i have a TB that i have ASKED the local cachers to claim without moving. it's kind of a sentimental thing... i wanted them all to have gotten posession of it before it goes wherever its going. is that still dorky? In my opinion, flask, it was not a well-thought-out idea. Just my opinion, so take it for whatever you think it's worth. If you had wanted everyone to 'log' that they'd 'had' it, you should have kept ahold of the actual physical item and just mailed out the tracking number. Once you placed it physically in a cache, the time to encourage people to keep on logging it was sort of over. In fact, even though I was the one to find it, I did quickly place it again in a local cache that was *very* easy for our local gaggle of cachers to get to; I was trying to do what I could to see that your wishes were met in some fashion. Unfortunately, the item was then promptly picked up by someone out of state, and as far as I can tell, it's not likely to come back to Vermont any time soon, unless you've mailed them and asked them to leave it somewhere local before they head home. So the only way the other Vermont cachers are going to get that item 'logged' is to 'grab' it from wherever it actually is, and that's going to wind up confusing people who had it, placed it, went home to log that they'd placed it, and found it gone from their inventory. So like I said, in my opinion, if you have an item that for sentimental reasons you want a lot of friends to log, HOLD ON TO IT until you're content that they've all had every chance to log it. *THEN* let it loose, and wave goodbye. -- Jay (Lemur)

quote:Originally posted by ju66l3r:The people still "virtually" grabbing it and not actually obtaining it from its current cache (in the same state or not) will also place it back in that cache (by note!). Therefore, no mileage added, they get credit for seeing the bug, and the next person to physically move it will get it from that cache and drop it off wherever later as normal. No harm done. Very, very, VERY wrong, unfortunately. Not about the "harm", because of course no one's being injured here, it's just a game. But it *does* screw things up. So far several of the people who have 'grabbed' that bug failed to replace it in the cache it was theoretically in. So we have a long chain of 'grabbed', 'grabbed', 'grabbed', etc. Two, there're going to be people going and logging finds of caches, having dropped the bug off in them, only to find when they get home to log their visit, they can't log that they dropped off the bug because someone 'grabbed' it from their inventory. And they can't 'grab' it back to place it because they no longer have the tag with the ID number. It's in a cache now. Yes, if they were really really anal, they might have written down the number before going out to place the bug, just in case some weirdo 'grabbed' it out of their inventory before they could log that they'd placed it, but who really expects to have to do that on a day to day basis? -- Jay (Lemur)

quote:Originally posted by ArcticNomad:We have noticed it as well, and find it a loss to the attractiveness of this section of the profiles page. It was so easy to watch your own bugs this way, and check other's lists. How do we go about making this more of an issue? I hate petitions, but THIS IS IMPORTANT!!!!!!!!!!!! Yep, we've noticed it too. Dunno what happened. I blame society. -- Jay (Lemur)

I know I used to be able to view someone's profile, click on their stats, and then click on one of their icons to see what they'd found or what they'd hidden. Not any more, evidently; when I click on the travel bug icon for folks who've hidden several, I get a none found result.