Ambrosia

A long time ago, I found one in a pringles can, when they were still made out of cardboard.

I'm frustrated that the guidelines keep changing. I stopped taking a proof of visit picture at Earth Caches, because they weren't required anymore. This is the first time that I became aware that they were reinstated. Was there an announcement made, perhaps in an email to all geocachers? How am I supposed to know what to do at Earth Caches if it keeps changing? I am behind on logging, and am trying to catch up. I hope that I don't get any EC finds denied because of this.

We have a lot of diversity in our area. We are in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, in the middle of Washington State. We're considered a shrub-steppe, which is basically just above a desert. Most people think of Washington as being rainy, but that's the west side (and even that is not as rainy as a lot of other places in the U.S.). We only have to travel a short distance to be in the mountains. Since we are in the center of the state, we only have to travel around three hours in any direction to see pretty much any of it. Here's a picture I took of our valley from a cache we were finding for our 18th Geo-anniversary a few days ago:

I know about the history, but the asterisk says, "*there is no actual blue switch". Just wondering where "blue switch" came from.

Why a blue switch?

I use favorites all the time when I've traveling. I will pick a random cache in the middle of the area that I'm visiting, then go to "find...all nearby caches". From there, sort by favorites, and keeping in mind the distance from your center of search, look at the highest favorited caches. If I have the time, I go through each of them, read the description, look at pictures and a few logs, and decide if the cache is something I want to look for. Sometimes, it's just a highly trafficked area by tourists (as barefootjeff mentions), but a lot of times doing this has taken me to some really cool places. Sometimes, it's a touristy spot that I didn't know about, sometimes it's a cool spot that most people don't know about, or a great container. When you are looking at the drop down menu for Favorites on a cache page, you can click on "View Who Favorited". From there, you can click on the link beside each name that says, "View Log". A lot of times people say why they liked the cache enough to favorite it.

We have a zipline in our backyard that is about 170' long, and goes over a creek. We thought about how fun it would be to make a zipline cache, but we really don't want to deal with cachers in our yard at any time, and the potential liability.

While living in Tennessee, I've found two caches placed on or in poison ivy. Like, one of them was hanging from the vine. Pretty astonishing. I'd probably rather find one in a cactus. Although I'm not sensitive to poison ivy, my husband is very allergic.

A few years back we took a cruise up to Alaska and rented a car to drive back home. It is a great drive. Now that we have a trailer we're planning on a trip back there - there are more RV sites than motel rooms along the way - hopefully grabbing the oldest in the Yukon Territory on the way, and maybe a side jaunt to Northwest Territory too (but not the oldest in NWT - it's a very long boat trip from Yellowknife ). Yup, we have a trailer, so that's what we'd like to do. My parents have done it, and loved it.

It's possible we would fly, but we really want to take the drive. It is so pretty, lots of animals. Of course, we would also like to take the ferry, as well. We've both been to Alaska (flying), so we want to take a more interesting route next time. My sister (with lots of her kids and grandkids) lives in Alaska, so that's good incentive, as well.

"Shadowy Overlords"

I'm happy to say that we finished all of the states this year. Well, all41 finished all of the states, because he has found caches in Alaska without me, so I've found caches in 49 states. Now we need to do a road trip to Alaska for me to be completely done. That won't happen next year, so maybe the year after that. Who knows.

I travel a lot, and I'll look at caches in the area that I'm traveling in. I end up only doing a handful, usually. I always wonder what the pm co's think about my looking (especially if I look at a page more than once, or come back to the area later and look again), especially when I don't find the caches. I've worried that I would get an email, but I never have. This will be a relief to me, not having someone watching what I'm doing.

To be a beta tester, you can walk away while the cache owner hides the cache. Then, they can give you the coords, and you can search for it and make sure that the coords are good. We've done that.

Your logsheet is pretty, kunarion! I like it. I just use a standard disclaimer, and have added my email address at the bottom.

In my micros, I use a strip of paper with a disclaimer fully covering one side, and the other side is completely blank, to be used for signatures. I also add completely blank strips of paper if the micro is big enough (which all of mine are), for extra signatures. When I first started, I printed the signature side with numbers and lines, but I gave up after a while. I don't really want to print both sides of a paper, and it doesn't seem to be needed. The numbers end up not meaning anything, when people start using more than one line or logging in different spots, anyway. I had someone log online once that they couldn't put their signature in the cache because all they found was a disclaimer. That made me laugh.

It's a common practice in the NW for people to log a new cache if they were with the owner when they placed it. Everyone around here has been doing that since we started in 2002. I guess it's a culture, and no one minds. We do what kunarion mentioned - there's a FTF after publishing, when someone finds the cache after it's gone live online. It seems pragmatic to me - either you have found a cache, or you have not. That's how the website works (not wanting to ignore the cache, because then it ceases to exist essentially, which does not work for accurate history). And looking for the cache later, after you've already been to it, is pretty silly, imo.

I've been to three: Mingo, GCHQ, and Original Stash. I'm frustrated with myself, because I was planning on visiting Beverly last month while traveling by, and managed to totally forget. I've been planning on doing GCD for a long while, I just need to make the time.

I've been happy using my bookmark lists on my phone. When I'm traveling, I can pull up the list, look at the map for the list, and see which caches are near me. That way I can look through multiple lists of different categories (I have lists for that trip, for caches on a global must do list, Jasmer, etc.). I feel if I lumped them in to one list, I'd be confused about which kind of cache I am looking at. This way, I can fairly easily see nearby caches by category. As long as I remember to do this.

I actually just saw this recently, as well, but I can't remember where.

Interesting. I know that I got lots of visits to my caches during the Mystery at the Museum promotion, with people mentioning the promotion in their logs. I don't think I got anything extra on my caches during Streak Week that I could obviously tell. And my caches are mostly relatively easy.

I had a fun week. I normally don't like forcing myself to cache every day, but I made it work, and had a good time. There is a local cacher here who works long shifts, and he didn't think that he could do it. But when he posted on facebook that he was going for it, I decided that I had no excuse and could do it to. I had some pretty good variety: an event, group caching, a multi, a puzzle, great hikes, and only two park and grabs. My favorite of the week was a tree climbing cache in a tall magnolia.

This is from the blog post of Streak Week: https://www.geocaching.com/blog/2019/08/streak-week-august-2019-faq/

You could write a message along the following lines: Of course, you won't do that, because you're a nicer person than I am. Oh, that's good.

Agreed. Nothing wrong with a long log, unless it contains completely uninteresting information that only the writer is interested in. Why do people always think others are interested in hearing every gory detail of their vacations? We're not. Speaking of unnecessary info, somebody logged one of my caches recently and puts this at the end of the log. I received a few of these logs, as well. I read through all the thanks, and had to think for a while about how I felt about it.