BigStick

The tags look cool. I may have missed this in a previous post but do the tags have the image on both sides or is the other side blank? Or does it have something else on it?

Congrats on the 12 FTF's! You have nothing to feel guilty about. You grabbed these over a 3 day span. If someone else wanted a FTF all they had to do was make the effort just like you did.

Just this week I went caching with laxbobber in -2 Fahrenheit. The next night we bought some face masks before we went out again. The face masks made a huge difference in comfort.

For long hikes in the boonies my pack has the following: GPSr big Ziploc bag of swag extra ziploc bags extra log book first aid kit emergency blanket snake bite kit Advil Benadryl emergency whistle Leatherman folding knife windproof lighter wire saw compass mini mag light head lamp leather work gloves PDA pens log book to make notes in small bottle of hand sanitizer travel pack of Wet ones campers toilet tissue insect repellent Sting Eze digital camera extra AA and AAA batteries rain poncho bottled water telescoping trekking pole I keep meaning to pick up a telescoping mirror to add to the bag too but just haven't gotten around to it.

Has anyone seen the winner for the Freedom theme yet? Is anyone besides me curious about the judging? It would be interesting to see the final scores for the winning entries. I have seen the Discovery winner, and although it is a cool photo (better than mine), I am not sure it hit on all the criteria being judged. Based on the rules there are a max 100 points possible based on the following categories: Creativity - 25 possible points Depiction of geocaching experience - 25 possible points Humor - 25 possible points Online Votes - 25 possible points I may be way off-base, but in my opinion (which doesn't matter at all ) the first winner shows no humor, does not depict a geocaching experience, and is not all that creative (numerous entries were submitted with the shuttle in them). I haven't gone back and looked at all the entries but I would think there might be some that hit on these 4 criteria. I'm sure some will say this post is just sour grapes because I didn't win. I have no expectation of winning, I just expect the winners to look like they clearly meet the published criteria. I'm all about fair play you know.

I used a slightly different idea for the Freedom theme as well. I actually based it on one of the threads here in the forum. I thought it was funny at the time See the photo here

I'm glad to see this topic come up. I was thinking about getting some FRS radios and was doing some research on them last night. One question I had concerns FRS vs GMRS. Can you get by with just FRS (it seems everything I find has the capability for both)? As The_Matneys posted earlier, the GMRS requires a license. Is this a worthwhile investment? Just curious, are those of you that use the upper band/5Watt/GMRS channels all licensed, or is it common to just use those channels and hope the black helicopters don't zero in on your location? . Thanks.

Has anyone else noticed that they are not getting emails for caches they own or have on their watch list? I noticed last night that I haven't been getting the emails even though logs were posted to caches I own and watch.

E-mail sent. Hope I'm not too late.

I haven't had a chance to go through the rules yet, but does anyone know if all the folks that receive and place a Jeep get to enter the contest immediately or are they excluded until they find another one (or the same one) as long as it was in a different cache?