Ckayda

I used to wait for a response but it became clear pretty quickly that's not really the done thing. Now, I might wait a few days only if I'm feeling sketchy about wether or not my answers are correct. I've only ever heard back from a CO once.

I LOVE to write and I feel that, in most cases, I make exceptional effort to write nice, readable, hopefully entertaining, log entries. This applies no matter what size the cache is. HOWEVER, if it is a run that is very obviously designed largely for the purpose of cachers being able to get lots of finds in a short amount of time for example: Around here many of our bike paths have micros/nanos all along them...D1/1.5D hides all largely hid in the same manner spaced almost precisely 520ft apart. Completely not interesting hides on completely not interesting commuter bike trails right along busy highways...cheap 35mm cannisters and test strip holders...and it's clear that the CO never intended for it to be anything more than numbers because the same guy has some of the best hides in town otherwise. In this case I will say "TFTC" in each one all of the way up to the last one that I found in which I will make a longer, hopefully interesting, summary of my experience with the run as a whole. Even this might be overachieving on my part and I'm pretty sure the CO doesn't expect it.

Last year I was out running on a bike trail through the woods outside of town. I was training for a marathon so I had to run a LONG way that day and there were no bathrooms on my route. I was suddenly stricken with "the urge" and wandered off into the woods to find a place to relieve myself. I dropped my drawers and sat on a tree that had fallen with my rear end hanging off the side of it. Took care of business. Then, as I was standing up, I looked into the hollow stump that the tree had left behind and, by golly, there was an ammo can. It's funny because there's this sort of Pavlovian response....a certain feeling that I always get right at the moment when I find a cache and it didn't matter that I had a very different agenda going on that day. It was just like, "There it is!" and I was all ready to pull out my pen and log my find. I had to take a moment and reorient myself and remember that I really wasn't out geocaching and that I had run a long way and I still had far to go to get back home. I did sign the log but the kicker was it turned out to be a challenge cache that required 10 letterbox finds so I didn't even get a smiley out of it (yet)!

Another example of unintended consequences for this practice: In my area we have a series of six stand alone caches. Each is supposed to contain a clue to the coordinates for a seventh "bonus cache". One cache in the series has been missing since about 1952 and, after a long string of DNFs, someone came along from out of town not realizing that the missing cache was part of a series. They replaced the cache, minus the hint fot the final of course, and logged it as a find. It now has a long string of finds since and it won't get properly maintained or archived which is all well and good until someone decides they want to go after that "bonus cache", finds all of the other five caches and then arrives at the sixth and discovers the path to the bonus to be irreparably broken.

Wow, I didn't even realize the Forerunner 205 could be used for Geocaching. I have the 210 and use it exclusively for running. I have an older (ancient) model Dell and I never did manage to get my 210 to "talk" to it. Fortunately I don't need it to as the only reason for a runner to ever want to connect is for the purpose of tracking statistics that I think are sort of lame. Sorry I can't be more help.

This is interesting to me because I also found a penny at the site of a DNF recently. It was heads up and I have this little superstition thing about heads up pennies being good luck so I took it. It was in a wooded not heavy traffic area so I remember thinking it was odd. There was a crude lean-to nearby that looked like a homeless person had been sleeping there recently and, since I was alone, I didn't spend a lot of time looking for the cache...it very well could have been there.