Ambrosia

I dunno...I think Signal looks a bit overdressed for streaking.....

I was at a big event all day Saturday and couldn't get away to do some caching. I found a couple of cool virtuals in Chicago on Sunday, however. Just one day too late for a souvenir.

I'm still here. Just doing more lurking than posting.

Hey, we're living in Chattanooga right now - hopefully we'll see you at an event sometime.

I had one memory that was brought up by this thread. Nine years ago we went into some slot canyons, where we found two earthcaches: PEEK-A-BOO CANYON and Spooky Canyon (as usual, I look at those logs and realize that I never posted pictures). It was a long drive to get there, and about a mile hike in to the slots. We started a bit later in the day. We visited two slots in the daylight, with it almost becoming too dark to see out of the second. Then we partially visited another slot in the full darkness. Then, we were faced with a hike back in the dark (we had flashlights). If I remember correctly, the first part of the hike is fairly obvious, but then it's just open from there. We waymarked the car, but it was just so dark and disorienting trying to find the best way out. It was a bit disconcerting. There was just so many walls and cliffs and ravines, so trying to figure out the best route got us turned around. We got ourselves going up a hill somehow, and it turned steep and rocky, so we were rock climbing/scrambling in the dark to get up it. I guess we could have turned around, but it was the shortest way to our car at that point. I'm sure we weren't in any real danger, but that was one of the most nervous times I've felt while caching.

It's probably a bit relative. Just because people can post longer logs on the app or a keyboard, doesn't mean they won't. I get so curious about why people do what they do, and would like to know statistics. I wish there was some way to be able to do that, but the info that is out there is so subjective.

I agree that cachers who have only used the app probably have a tendency to treat geocaching differently. I suppose that without going on the website, they could look at it as just a quick app, and not understand the community aspect or a lot of the guidelines (this is just a guess). However, I'm not sure how much I agree about how the app or using a phone would make the logs shorter. With us "old" people, typing on a phone can seem to be a bit of a struggle. But I would think younger people would be used to it. My daughter will send me these hugely long texts. I don't know how or why she does it. I call them her "books". We've seen her typing on her phone, she types so fast her fingers are like a blur. At first, I was very against using my phone to post logs. But I have a problem with not logging later if I wait. So I've been trying harder to log using the app on my phone. I've found that it's actually not that hard to post a medium sized log. I've been appreciating the rest in my air conditioned car while I log a cache before heading to another one. Dang heat and humidity! I probably wouldn't be caching right now, but I'm sorta working on the Mystery at the Museum.

We went into Indiana to find our first cache there. I glanced at this nearby cache to see that it had recent finds, but didn't read the logs. After getting to GZ and having issues, I read that there had been a throwdown less than a week before. This cache really should be moved, because it's a lampost cache, but the skirt is missing. There is nowhere to hide a cache, and I'm befuddled as to where the throwdown was even placed. No wonder it's already missing. We went out of our way to try and find a cache in this state, but I didn't throw down another cache. We drove farther and found a cache at a really cool location and I'm so glad I was forced to find something more interesting than a LPC for this state. Ambrosia Premium Member 2652 Didn't find it 06/15/2019 We were trying to get a cache in Indiana, and this was the closest. I spent a long time looking for it in the rain, but my husband pointed out that there was only so many places it could be. Without a skirt, this isn't really an LPC, like it says in the hint. View / Edit Log / Images Upload Image Member 72 Found it 06/13/2019 Thanks for replacing the missing cache. Tftf View Log Premium Member 3124 Found it 06/09/2019 [...] and I went ahead and replaced the container, happy caching to those who follow. View Log Premium Member 312 5 Found it 06/09/2019 Thanks for the smiley on this sunny day View Log Member 72 Needs Maintenance 05/05/2019 Co needs to check on cache View Log Member 72 Write note 03/16/2019 Needs maintenance. Cash is gone View Log Premium Member 711 Didn't find it 12/27/2018 This definitely gone. View Log Charter Member 34508 Didn't find it 09/19/2018 Yes another Wednesday is upon us and yes we are out and about the Cincinnati area caching once again. Today I am with [...]. Hitting some caches we have tried before and failing once again at a couple and redeemed a DNF or two as well. Yes a DNF on a LPC.... Thanks for the cache. View Log Premium Member 21433 Didn't find it 09/19/2018 Caching with [...]. nope. View Log Member 3 Found it 07/31/2018 Awesome hide. We put another log strip in! View Log

Yup! Just a habit.

Didn't Mary Hyde have some sort of puzzle? I thought it was going to be more like that. I'm not a fan of puzzles, but this seemed to be gearing up to some actual "detective" work, that seemed appropriate for this theme, and I was kinda looking forward to that. I'm not sure if this promotion is doable for me, it's a fair amount of caches to look for, with not as much payoff as I thought there'd be. We'll see.

I forgot to mention, if you open the cache info while in service, it will all stay there when you go out of service. As long as you don't close the app. This is using the official app.

Usually, if the caches show up on my map while in service, they are still there when I lose service. I can't get any new caches to show up, but those that are there still have info. Sometimes all of the info is there, but sometimes I only have partial info (cache description but no cache logs, for instance). At the very worse, all I have is the cache icon on the map, and I can get myself there and search for it blindly. That's happened to me a fair amount of times. Things are much better now that I download things as a kind of knee jerk reaction to these events.

We've been doing a lot of caching last minute around the SE lately. I've just gotten in the habit of either downloading a bookmark in advance, or doing it on the fly while driving. I don't want to take a chance of ending up in a dead zone. If we're driving away from bigger towns, it's a good bet that there will not be cell service. A lot of my caching lately has been using downloaded lists on my phone or gps. Of course, we tend to be going to places that are fairly remote (there's a lot of that down here!).

I usually check to see if there are events near where I am traveling. The timing is always bad, however. I think I've found three events that happened to be occurring that I was able to attend, but those were all for short trips (within my state or just outside of it). This is in 17 years of caching, and tons of travel. When we were in SE Asia last year, I found a couple events hosted by travelers, but we just missed them. One was in Cambodia, hosted by a cacher from Italy. It happened the day after we left the country. I left a note saying I would just miss it, and another cacher (possibly from New Zealand or Australia) noted that they would miss it by 12 days. It ended up being attended by a couple of cachers from the Netherlands. It would have been fun to have been able to attend, I was bummed.

Actually, more than seven are showing up, but only two of the problem ones showing up on my desktop map are showing - the other two are missing from the app. So, both the app and the desktop map are glitchy.

Okay, now that I look at my app and do a search in my area, about seven caches pop up, rather than the four showing on the desktop map. Something's glitchy here... Using my desktop was so bad (I looked in an area I am traveling to on Saturday - even with a lot of caches there, zero were showing up as a detective clue), that I was about to give up on this promotion.

Huh, interesting. Even though I have updated my app fairly recently, the Mystery at the Museum link did not show up. I just updated it again, and now it's there.

Well, this is disappointing. For one thing, I expected another email from Groundspeak that the promotion had started. Another video perhaps? If I hadn't been monitoring, I wouldn't have remembered that this promotion had started. Also, if I was someone who wasn't afraid to poke around on a website, I would have never figured out how to find which caches have a clue. So that pretty much cuts out anyone out there who is not internet savvy, like my mother-in-law, for instance. I used the map filter to find caches with the detective clue in my area. I haven't found very many caches here, but even so, only four caches popped up nearby. One is disabled, two are either missing or trashed, and one is a mystery that is actually almost an hour round trip to complete. I also don't see how to find which caches have these clues by using the phone app - nothing's showing up on my phone. I know I updated the app maybe a month ago, so it should be up to date?

Did you catch Gia Coyne? That one is a bit easier to catch when she says it.

"Teague-Ulmer museum". I didn't catch that until I saw it in writing.

I've never found a painted rock in a cache. I've found a fair amount of painted rocks near caches, but I think that's just a coincidence. Most of those spots were just popular places to be. My favorite painted rocks were in an odd location, by the side of a road where people wouldn't be looking for them. There was an EC nearby. They were so bright and cheery that I wanted to take them to keep, but I made myself leave them there. My favorite was the love one:

Yup, just take a picture of your hand, like this:

I hid my first cache after a month and a half of caching and 62 finds. Almost 15 years later, the cache is still in place. My husband hid his first cache (with my help), after a month and a half of caching, and maybe 15 finds. My first cache hide was after a little more than than two months of caching, and about 25 finds. Both caches are doing great, and are just about 17 years old. Of course, I'm not sure how much that applies to today, as there were very few caches and cachers around back then.

Right now, when you want to submit a new cache but have another disabled/NM/NA cache, you get a warning page about it. You can just go past this page. But I would be a bit worried if you were required to fix those things before you could submit your new cache. I can sort of see it if you have a NM or NA, but I don't think that a disabled cache should stop you from placing a new cache. For example, I just submitted a new cache, and on my warning page, it pointed out that I have a disabled cache. That cache is disabled because it's in an area that has a nesting bald eagle, and it's a federal offense to walk through there at this time. The disabled cache is not an instance of cache owner neglect, but of cache owner maintenance.

I'm pleased you are okay. That would have been scary. (Fortunately that has never happened to me.) Thanks. I'm extra sensitive to semis, so that makes it difficult for me. My mom and I took a road trip around the country when I was 16, so I drove a lot as practice, since I was a newer driver. When we got to the highway around Salt Lake City, we got boxed in by fast driving semis and I had a bit of a panic attack (but I managed to drive through it ok). So I have a bit of a phobia towards them.