Ambrosia

If it's anything like a virtual, webcam, EC, or LB, I won't be able to get the souvenir. I don't have any unfound nearby.

Off-topic, but CO emails is why I haven't done a PMO since '09 (though the other 2/3rds did a couple of/with friends). Got tired of emails from micro-managing, anal-retentive cos from out of my area asking when I'm finally gonna hit it, when I simply look at it more than once. One accusing me of theft (turns out it was muggled) was the clincher. Said something on a local site about it, a local CO thought I was speaking of them ... and everything kinda went downhill real quick. Even though it's easy to skip that audit today, easier on me to not do them at all. Odd, I've looked at lots of far off (and nearby) PM caches, sometimes multiple times, and have never received an email from an owner.

I'm without a DSLR now. Either my camera died, or my battery. I used to have three batteries, but managed to lose two over time, and so I'm not sure what the culprit is, because my camera won't turn on. I need to borrow a battery from someone and find out. I feel naked without the camera. For a while (about the first half of this year), we didn't have a camera at all, except for our phones. And both our phones have terrible cameras. Terrible. We finally broke down and got a decent point and shoot from Costco. It's not too bad, and it fits in the pocket.

I do think they're the best kind of cache container. But they are not always fireproof. If the fire is hot enough, it will destroy the ammo can. We've lost a fair amount around our area. A cacher I was talking to recently said that they will explode in a hot fire. I did find one recently that went through a fire and it was still intact. The rubber seal was charred, and the bag on the inside had bubbled.

A good flat and phillips head screw driver will be the tool of the trade when you are having trouble with them. Exactly what I said! The cache is a tall pvc pipe with slots up the side, and you have to use popsicle sticks to pop a ball with the cache in it up the tube. Takes a lot of coordination and time. I told 'Tudles that we could just unscrew the pipe and upend it. Would have taken a lot less time. Interesting idea, to use the Frog Character seen at Mega Events on top of a pipe, - found one where you had to put water in a pipe to get the cache to come up, but I guess if my fingers were longer I could've pulled it out anyways. Ah, the Signal's mine. I own several of them. I brought him to take a picture of the official geocaching mission. Maybe I should rename him Ethan Hunt.

A good flat and phillips head screw driver will be the tool of the trade when you are having trouble with them. Exactly what I said! The cache is a tall pvc pipe with slots up the side, and you have to use popsicle sticks to pop a ball with the cache in it up the tube. Takes a lot of coordination and time. I told 'Tudles that we could just unscrew the pipe and upend it. Would have taken a lot less time.

Not many I do have a large amount of FPs (but then many don't do them), so looking around at what others find fun was an eye-opener for me. One of the few close enough with 10+ turned out to be a location where I questioned why anyone would stop there to favorite it, much less more-than-ten. In an area that gives FPs for ftf, friends of the CO, breaking guidelines, or just out having fun with others that day, it kinda fit I guess. I just shook my head and headed for home. Oh, no! So bizarre.

I wasn't going to go out of my way to get the souvenir. I like souvenir's, but when the 30 days of August thingy started, I told myself I wouldn't ever make myself work too hard over a souvenir. So, I only had three caches that were reasonable for me to find that had 10+ favorites. The reason I hadn't found them yet was because they're gadget caches and I am terrible with those. So my MIL and I went to one close to my house that we had "dnf'd" before (only because we couldn't get into it), and spent a goodly amount of time working on getting to the log. It turned out to be a fun excuse to rectify a dnf, and we were quite jubilant when we had the log in our hand. I was quite pleased that it worked out that the mission encouraged me to go back (we eventually would have, anyway), and we felt the cache was complicated enough to deserve the mission. Hey, in larger cache areas, you could find skirt lifters with 10+ favorites.

It looks to me that the gc emails do not mention that the info would be available to everyone the day of, until three days after the encoded message was sent out. However, the blog had a post that told that information a full 10 days before the encoded message went out. And there was an email on that day from Groundspeak that had a link to the blog post. So the info wasn't put in plain text in a regular email, but the info was there if you clicked on a link.

So was I. It's now 8:30AM on *Sunday* on the U.S. east coast and I haven't seen an email message from GS about it. Ok, I guess I just don't have very good reading comprehension. They never said that they would send out another email. This is what they said: I don't know how many people that really reaches. Although I've liked them on facebook and follow them on twitter, I only look at those sites once in a blue moon. And I've never noticed the blurbs on the bottom of the gc main page. So without an email, I wouldn't know about these things. I do have an email notice whenever there's a new post on the blog. I wonder how many people missed the memo. Of course, I know a lot of premium members who haven't asked to get the emails from grounspeak, either, but then that's their choice to miss out. I saw the original info somewhere (maybe on the App?)... completely misread everything... then forgot about it, expecting that the email on the 22nd would explain it all. I don't check Twitter nor Facebook (because when I do, there is never any information that I am looking for. And this applies pretty much to everywhere on Twitter or Facebook ). “Premium members will receive an email including the encoded message one week prior to each souvenir release. Decoding the message will unlock instructions for securing the next souvenir. The first encoded message will be sent to Premium members on July 22, 2016.” It didn't occur to me that I needed any particular email settings enabled, so I didn't set anything up, and never got an email. Does anyone know how many “encoded messages” there were? One per souvenir, maybe? What was in that message? I see the current instructions, which I assume is the same message that was sent on the 22nd, but decoded for us. Or is there still a currently encoded message for “the next souvenir”? I went to my email settings and almost selected "send tips and tricks" just now... then I remembered, I don't want to be sent tips and tricks, that's why it's not selected. We only received one puzzle message for this weekend's souvenir. So I'm assuming we'll get another one a week before each of the other missions, respectively.

So was I. It's now 8:30AM on *Sunday* on the U.S. east coast and I haven't seen an email message from GS about it. Ok, I guess I just don't have very good reading comprehension. They never said that they would send out another email. This is what they said: I don't know how many people that really reaches. Although I've liked them on facebook and follow them on twitter, I only look at those sites once in a blue moon. And I've never noticed the blurbs on the bottom of the gc main page. So without an email, I wouldn't know about these things. I do have an email notice whenever there's a new post on the blog. I wonder how many people missed the memo. Of course, I know a lot of premium members who haven't asked to get the emails from grounspeak, either, but then that's their choice to miss out.

Ah, I see it on the home page. I don't ever look at the thing, so it's the first time I've noticed - those links at the bottom are nice, especially the event one. I was still expecting to receive an email from Groundspeak at least by 9am...

It's not July 30th for another hour. Plus, it says morning, so I doubt that will be at midnight.

You've made my day. No, my month!!! I keep track of my DNFs and my rate is around 11%. I've now found many of them, and lots have since been archived; but there are still around 240 active caches that are on my DNF list. I know some of the reasons my rate is high, and If I counted my "drive by and ignore" caches my DNF rate would be higher. I don't search long in very public places. I don't give evergreen hangers much time either. But I'll usually give them all a short look just in case they jump out at me. If I'm in a cache rich area I hate to spend a lot of time on one when I could potentially find three others in the same time period. To me a good difficult cache is one that requires a long and/or complicated trail-less approach, rather than nit picking the fake rock out of a gravel pit or the zip lock baggie between the stones in a wall. So I cache the way I want and the DNF total will continue to grow. Glad to be of service.

A crummy commercial?!? I love that part. I reference it all the time.

I guess I'll have to wait until the day of, because puzzles give me hives. I'm not even going to attempt it. DNA (Did Not Attempt).

What blog are you talking about??? The Groundspeak blog, formerly named "something or other 47" (I can't remember). https://www.geocaching.com/blog/ The email directed you to the blog post with the hints. B. It used to be called Latitude 47. I loved that name, and am sad that they changed it.

My son has been caching since he was five (he's now 19). He's quite ambivalent about it, even though he's always been the best in the family at finding the containers. So he calls us up on Friday, so excited, breathing hard because he and his fiance are running to the closest park to catch pokemon. He said there were like 30 other people in the park playing pokemon, and someone driving by yelled out of their car window, "Go team blue!". Glad I read the OP's first post to my husband so that we were all on the same page when our son called. We were at church on Saturday and my son was showing me a pokemon that was right in front of us while we were in line for potluck. Oh, my goodness. My parents drove me home from church, and we drove by a cluster of young people on the side of the road staring at their phones. My parents were trying to figure out what was going on, and I told them "Pokemon go." And then I read them the OP's first post. So! This thread has been helpful with us old folks! My husband just can't figure it out. I told him that lots of people think that geocachers are weird nerdy people, too, and it isn't that much different.

Cute story, I like your writing style. And the story was helpful to me, as a friend on Facebook posted this about it and I had no clue what she was talking about:

Agreed. I haven't been to a garage sale for a while, but in the past I've found some good things for trading. It's like anything else, just have a little patience and you might be surprised what you find.

Interesting. It looks like they've redesigned that list and are now adding future souvenirs, even if they haven't been publicly announced yet. Did you notice that they don't have anything in 2016 for a summer marketing promotion (e.g. Road Trip, 7 Souvenirs of August, etc.)? Considering the fact that they've listed other future, unannounced souvenirs, I have to assume this means there won't be one this year. Or it could mean Groundspeak hasn't figured out what this year's promotion will be yet. Or maybe they want it to be a surprise. Well, there is the devil ducky race this summer. But that's not the same as previous summer caching promotions.

I've twice offered to and then packaged up and sent people back their travel bugs when they had special meaning to them. Both times they never contacted me again. Who knows if they received them? A thank you would be nice? Like you, I didn't do it for a thank you, but it didn't feel great to be met with silence.

Actually, what I said was: "it means I feel that I gave the search a good try, and while I may well have missed something, I can't definitively say it's missing, or I failed to find it successfully." You must have misinterpreted my words. What I italicized is also what I infer from seeing a DNF log in a cache's history. Not that the cache [only] might be missing, but that it 1] might be missing, or 2] was not sufficiently found even though 3] the person actually made an active attempt to locate it as the CO intended, whatever type of cache it is. But I don't follow that expectation hard and fast, since clearly people have different practices and understandings of what a DNF log means. If I see multiple DNFs, my inference leans towards it being difficult to locate and many cachers have failed - either because it might be missing, or it's really hard; and usually that's dependent on the difficulty and/or terrain rating. This is why, for example, I don't expect to see DNFs on an Earthcache (those are rare) unless the requirements could not be completed because perhaps the person could not locate a very significant object from which to glean answers to questions. To contrast, if I were to go for an EC but could not arrive at the posted location to even begin any field research required because there was construction around the block, I would log a Note with an explanation, not a DNF; and perhaps even contact the CO to let them know the EC is not accessible. I've DNF'd EC's four times. The first was in a National Park. As we got to the posted coordinates, I read the cache description and realized that they wanted you to find other similar formations to compare in the rest of the park to complete the EC. Well, we were on the way out of the park at that point and it was too late to find other formations. I guess they assumed people were coming in a certain entrance and would find the EC at the beginning of the trip? I was a bit frustrated and posted a DNF in a tiny hope that the EC owner would think a bit about it, but I doubt it mattered to anyone but me. The second was an EC that I got to late in the day and I could barely make out the formation that I was supposed to describe so I had to DNF it and come back and find it another day. The third one was an EC that we came to from a boat. The EC was on an island, and we couldn't find a place to get onto the island because it was so rocky (other people came from the other side of the island by car). We could answer a couple of the questions from the boat, but one of the questions required looking at a plaque that we couldn't see from the water. The fourth was really weird. Another National Park. We got to the coordinates and couldn't see anything like the cache page described, even though we looked everywhere. It's like we had the wrong coordinates, but we didn't because I had downloaded them directly from the site. I'll always be mystified by that one. We must just be unobservant, because no one else seemed to have a problem with that one. It's funny that half of my DNF's were by the same EC owner, in two different National Parks. I'm fairly experienced with EC's, I've found about 150 of them. I'm not sure what that means, it's probably just a coincidence.

Hm, the paid app still works for me...

Go to your geocaching page: https://www.geocaching.com/my/default.aspx On the right side is a column with a lot of info/stats/links. Go down the column a little ways until you find "Search for geocaches near your home location (filter out finds). Click on "(filter out finds)" link. You can also use the map link that's right next to those links and filter out finds on the geocaching map as well.