daraconn

Well, let me say now what I should have said in the first place - thanks for volunteering to do this! I am very much looking forward to having this new feature in place and have often wished we could have it but never thought it could be possible. I really appreciate that you and Jeremy are putting in the work to make this happen.

Katja, 2 more purely factual clarifications (still staying well away from politics): - it's not just 24 caches. It just happened that out of the first 40 caches returned by my query, 24 were listed as Ireland. If this is representative, we may estimate that approximately half of the caches in Northern Ireland are listed as "Ireland". - it's not a "mistake", and it's not chaotic; it's policy. This procedure is in place with the full and explicit approval of the reviewers, and is based on extensive discussion to determine the best way of dealing with a complex situation. You may feel that this policy should be reversed for political reasons but please do not do so lightly or without some form of consultation with the people affected.

All these counties are already in the updated spreadsheet. The ones referring to the republic as part of Ireland, the other ones as part of the UK (it would be great if the Island of Ireland had a political status, but we can't go into politics here:) I promise not to go into politics here, or to enter into any further discussion on the subject, but I just want to make you aware (if you are not already) that the current practice is for caches in Northern Ireland to be allocated to Ireland or the United Kingdom according to the whim or preference of the cache owner. For example, the 40 caches nearest to Belfast (all of which are located in Northern Ireland) are divided roughly equally between "Ireland" (24) and "United Kingdom" (16). If it is technically possible to have "Antrim", "Armagh", etc. included in both the Ireland and UK counties list, this would maintain an existing functionality that is widely used and appreciated by everyone concerned.

Edited to delete post discussing an issue that's already been amicably resolved

The sun sets at 4:11 this afternoon - for several months of the year the choice is between caching in the dark or not at all. Sometimes even during summer months, I find I have run out of daylight when there is still a good cache nearby*, or that I'm driving near a cache after sunset, and I decide to give it a try. Having said that, I have never actually gone out well-prepared (i.e. carrying a flashlight) and have generally relied on night-vision for getting to the cache location, and the backlight of my GPS (it's surprisingly powerful) for finding, logging and trading. This has been a surprisingly successful strategy, and has added one or two points of difficulty to forest caches, as well as providing the unusual experience of wandering about in the forest at night. I have been told that I "wasted" one of the best caches in Ireland by doing it in the dark, but I have no regrets - it was quite a spooky and memorable experience to be so far from the road in the pitch dark, with deer crashing around nearby. Even the sound of a pigeon taking flight from a nearby tree can set your heart thumping, and I was once terrified by two dogs that came running past me at full speed. * It's worth explaining that the density of caches in most of Ireland is far lower than seems to be the case in similarly populated areas of the US, so it's well worth taking extra trouble to find one, and "nearby" in this context could mean 20 miles away by road.

As remarked by another poster, a large number of those caches are in Okinawa prefecture. I've done some caching in Japan, and would say you could pick up about 10 around the Osaka Loop Line, over one or two days depending on how much of your time you want to dedicate to caching. I also recommend the city of Kobe, both for caching and sightseeing. We found 5 or 6 over the course of a day there. In Osaka and Kobe, we didn't have the problem described above with caches being hidden in places that were too crowded to allow for stealthy retrieval. Most of the caches, even in city centre areas, were possible to retrieve discreetly. I seem to remember there was at least one cache, maybe a webcam, near one of the Mt Fuji resort lakes, but it's mostly a cache desert, apart from the Fuji virtuals themselves.