Oxford Stone

Small success - one of those TBs I dropped off in June that a noob picked up in August, I messaged them (2 accounts, dad and son it turns out) and dad said "oops, I thought my son had dropped it off" so hopefully that will get back in circulation. Another few months and still the only TBs I've seen have been at an event (the film festival) - maybe it's just our area but that seems to be the only place TBs circulate now.

You're making me wonder how many maintenance trips I need to do this year... One will be to a cache which may or may not have survived recent floods. I was surprised to get a Found log on it recently just saying "G". Looked up the "cacher" and they'd logged 20 puzzle caches the same way for the same day, but at least one pre-dates the proximity rule on puzzles and is several miles away. Chances of logs beige genuine = 0 so I alerted the local FB group and many of these logs will have been deleted. Only time I've had an obvious fake log on one of my caches though. I had to smile at the "how long does it take to roll up a nano log?" discussion. Local to me (and daddybeth) is a one-armed cacher who dreads nanos and bisons more than tree climbs! (Look at my "Thames Path - Floodproof" for his selfie 20 feet up the tree. I think he has a chin-to-shoulder technique for unscrewing the containers. Rolling the papers back up must take him forever.

My son is 10 1/2, has been caching since 3 1/2, finished his DT grid before he was 10*, got his 4100th cache yesterday. He's still growing into caching - yesterday on a 3 mile walk he was doing the tree climbs, and over the last year he's done several all-day (8-mile +) walks and mountain bike rides. On 31/12 I noticed my total for 2019 had gone down on the previous 3 years but his was up by a few. For many years his finds as a % of mine were 60-68%; in 2019 it was 83%! Really pleased with that stat. I can only think of a handful of days when I went out caching solo in 2019; many of the ~180 I got alone will have been on business trips. *there's one or two where someone else solved the puzzle or did the final retrieve - but he's been kayaking several times and underground on at least 6 occasions I can think of, half of those involving running water. There may well be a teenage time when he grows out of it, who knows? Meanwhile we have a lot of fun together. Most of the medium-size walks are in the company of Mrs OS, who found more caches than me yesterday. Siblings, nephews and nieces pretty much expect a meet-up with us to involve some caching.

https://coord.info/GC5MPR7 - fill the calendar grid with 41 days where you have found caches on anniversary days. Took me 11 months from finding the container (when I was on about 11/41) to getting the extra 30 days. A few of my other favourite ones are in the "wouldn't be allowed any more" category,eg Find twenty different NON Traditional caches whose first letter of the name spells out A L T E R N A T I V E C H R I S T M A S (in order!) Two I'm SLOWLY working on are "find a cache in each increment of 5 miles from home up to 250 miles" (all good up to I think 125.1-130) and "find a cache in 181 km squares of Ordnance Survey map 181" (there are loads of these in the UK) - I've done the 3 nearest to home, but this one is in the 30-60 miles away zone. On about 130/181 I think.

7000th cache (~460 to go) 4th loop of found date calendar (6 to go) Furthest south (sales conference in Rio likely in May); furthest north? (possible conference in N Scotland; or we just invite ourselves to a Finnish caching buddy's for Christmas) Put out two new series of caches, but wait until I have inspiration for som Wow factor before hiding Tupperware in trees Go camping at a mega (Junior and I have been given a tent for Christmas - DHL / Santa came early - so there will be some more ambitious trips) 2019 brought 2 new countries, some new UK counties, furthest east, 4 countries and 7 states / counties in a day, 6000th cache, 4000th and DT completed for Junior.

I put out a series of caches a year ago where two long stretches of the path have no decent hiding places except a fence along one side - so I attached bisons to the wire by post with diagonal supports on each side and used the hint "CND" (as in the CND / Peace logo). A couple of people saying they didn't get it, one saying they'd seen elsewhere (it's been copied locally this year), most people like it.

Looking more closely at that, it's obviously an auto-signature thing they have in place. They've removed it on this occasion. Capital letter after semi-colon, though? Irksome!

I tell you what irks me - I STILL haven't found a cache on 31 September [see above]...

There are plenty of well-travelled, long-lived TBs out there. As I said I would above, I've recovered https://coord.info/TB5D2HK to take about 120 miles away to SW England later in the week - it's currently on 17111.3 miles and has seen a lot of Europe and the USA in the last 6 and a half years.

Good point - is a TB hotel a good thing or not? In an ideal world it's near a major road / station / airport, allowing for easy TB swaps and putting extra miles / km on the TBs as they go on a new journey. I'd not come across the behaviour you mention, Twentse, but I did visit a TB hotel by the motorway round London recently and although it said it contained 5 TBs, they were all long gone and neither the takers nor the CO have updated the logs. Very frustrating.

I've gone 4 months and over 300 caches without finding a TB in a cache. The last three that I found in late June and put out within a week or so: 1 nobody has visited the cache since. It's half a mile from my office so I might liberate it... 1 people are saying no sign in the cache - next visitor after me was a noob so that will be the end of that 1 was picked up on 7 July and still in the hands of the cacher, I think they've done about 40 caches since. Maybe I'll suddenly find a whole load, but I think (reading horror stories about mega events) that TBs are dying out.

I've got 58 puzzle caches, from the fiendish to the "spend 5 minutes on Wikipedia" type. Most get found about once a month on average. Most are in groups, rewarding the solver with a decent walk and 8-12 caches. One uses Vigenere but otherwise no classic ciphers. There's a city in England with a rash of puzzles for which according to the preamble you'll need to write a computer programme to solve them. They seem to have got about 60 finds each in nearly 3 years so there's obviously a market for them although I would not know where to start! About 100 miles east of me there's a big series of puzzles and I don't know where to start with any of them - I think consciously or sub-consciously COs set similar puzzles to neighbours and these ones are just in a different school of thought to what there is in Oxfordshire. I'm always mystified by puzzle caches being Premium Only - an ill-intentioned muggle would have to solve the puzzle to find the coords to steal it! I suppose they want to reduce the number of enquiries from less experienced cachers, like this one I got re one of my multis: Jul 6, 2019 11:15 AM Regarding (GC!"£$%): Hi I am not sure we’re your geocache is please may you give me a hint thank you You Jul 6, 2019 4:15 PM How many numbers have you found. You realise it's a multi, yes? Jul 6, 2019 10:41 PM Yes You Jul 7, 2019 10:46 AM So what numbers are you stuck on. Have you been to the alley through to Pizza Express. Aug 19, 2019 12:10 PM Not to be annoying but how do you place a caches You Aug 19, 2019 7:37 PM Look on website. Hide a cache. Aug 19, 2019 7:37 PM What website You Aug 19, 2019 7:39 PM Www.geocaching.com... It's really worth finding a hundred or more before starting to think about hiding one. Then you will know what makes a cache good or bad, what sort of thing you want to do. Look out for Facebook groups for help too. Geocaching UK for example. Aug 19, 2019 7:40 PM Thank you [then they went off the radar...]

As people have said below you're misinterpreting what I said - I suppose I shouldn't have used the dirty word(s) that is Power Trail. Let's rephrase to "I'll go on a couple of lovely 4 or 5-mile country walks with 20 caches each..." which is essentially what I meant. My record day's caching, 115 I think, was a power trail and boy they were monotonous - I think I bestowed one FP (for a cache that pre-dated the PT) and kept the other 10 for another day. https://coord.info/GC5Q48R planned for next Thursday on a mini-break. A couple of the caches in the series might actually be quite good, looking at the write-ups, and it's a pretty part of the country. Though to tie in with your point - I've often searched an area for most FPs and up there is the first or last cache on a series, even though it's a boring one back at the trailhead - "FP for the series". I try to pick out the unusual / scenic / challenging cache along the way, when possible.

I leave FPs in place because they were deserved at the time I found the cache. If I want to earn 4 more FPs to bestow, I'll find a 40-cache power trail somewhere. As with so many elements of this hobby, we can each do things the way that suits us.

daddybeth you need to go SW to the Berkshire Downs (Lambourn / Uffington area) where Longpod, Pebbles & Co and others have put out loads of caches. We enjoyed your series, glad to see you taking feedback from me and others on board and overcoming some teething issues (we all get them...)

If I go caching abroad (usually on a business trip, see "Collecting Countries") or on the way to / form a football match, it'll probably be an urban cache and therefore a micro (though there is a massive ammo box, bigger than a suitcase, under a bridge in York...) and I'm not expecting much else. If it's an ingenious find then all the better. If it just gives me a smiley in a new city then that's fine (recently in Seville / Granada / Málaga, 16 forgettable caches one clever one - still a micro). Size expectations go up when out in the countryside - mind you, one CO a county away still manages to make most of their hides micros in thorn bushes even when a mile from the nearest road...

Outside chance. This will be next April / May. More likely to go a day or two early in the hope of seeing a football (soccer!) match.

I'm probably not the only one lucky enough to get international travel with work (so occasionally doing evening urban caches with a bemused colleague or business partner...) All done in work trips: USA, Greece, Luxembourg A region of Wales 2 of my 4 French regions (of the total of 13) 6 of my 7 Spanish regions (there are 19 in all) 6 of my 8 Belgian regions (there are 11 in all) 4 countries and 7 regions in a day (Lux-Bel-Fra-Eng) Our next annual team conference is in Rio, though I've already done Brazil - but it'll be a new furthest south if I find one.

On Saturday we - that's me, OS Junior (non-premium account) and Mrs OS (comes on most weekend walks but not all) found 22 caches that took me past 6400 and OS Junior to 3995. We wondered how many the long-suffering Mrs OS would have, if she had an account. Probably 2500-3000. She always finds the hardest ones - on this walk the 22 were quite evenly split between who saw them first. She's never used a smartphone or GPS in her life! She'd be delighted to have a term to describe her role, I'm sure...

It now says 13/9/19 (or 9/13/19 depending on where you are...) - someone must have had a word.

How does that work? Are we allowed to put arbitrary placed dates now? I drove close to that spot last Monday when I went to Antwerp for work; last Tuesday I got my 13th country, Luxembourg, and on the drive home from there to England on Wednesday managed 4 countries, 7 regions and 7 counties (4 in Belgium and all new ones for me). I can see ways of beating 7 counties relatively easily (going from Oxfordshire to Kent and back, each side of London on the orbital M25 motorway) but I think the other 2 will be personal bests for a long time if not forever.

I've had 2 FTFs that didn't count, both on submitted caches that turned out to break the proximity rule to a non-trad. The first one, the older multi (that I was searching for) had gone missing and was archived - my "FTF" was never published; the 2nd one was too close to a cache in the same series where the path twists back on itself, I'd seen a gap between two neighbours and looked in a likely spot on the off chance! The CO had received the reviewer rejection but not got round to picking up the container or re-submitting the cache. Good job I'm not huge on FTFs - Project GC tells me "Oxford Stone has 70 FTF (1.10%)" (one every 35.7 days)... [one of the local FTF fiends has 297 FTF (10.24%)...]

I've got 3 fairly mundane caches between my house and the town centre and don't expect amazing logs on them. But (as per point 3 in the OP) I enjoyed some recent logs from 2 cachers who found them on the way into town for an after-work burger. Simple thing but it just painted a picture. As a finder, when I find a cache in a motorway service station or railway station, I say what my journey that day was and it's interesting to read where other people were going. I don't mind brief / generic logs on my easy trads, but it's a bit sad when I get the same on one of my multis or puzzles that take a bit of effort and still I get a pasted log. I don't let it spoil my day though.

all tiddly by American / Asian standards. I remember going on an all-day drive in NE Brazil, looking at the route on a national map and we'd moved a fingernail's width. If Germany was a US state it'd be 5th biggest, between Montana and New Mexico... I had no idea it was smaller than France, Spain, Sweden and Norway - my Euro-geography needs brushing up. You learn something every day (or as they say in French, je me coucherai moins bête ce soir (I'll go to bed less stupid tonight)...

Thanks for that link - I knew I'd seen my souvenirs arranged by category, as opposed to the alphabetical order display on the official site somewhere. USA, Canada, Germany, Australia with big states / provinces lend themselves to such things I suppose. Brazil would too but caching isn't huge over there; quite surprising Spain doesn't have them. On the UK / England etc question, quick (hopefully non-political!) recap: On my passport it says United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. So UK = Eng + Wal + Sco + NI (none of these 4 are sovereign states in their own right); GB = Eng + Wal + Sco (though at the Olympics etc we're called GB, with Northern Irish athletes competing too; cricketing England are actually England and Wales; rugby and cricket both have national teams called Ireland). The "mainland" of the "British Isles" (a phrase that logically has to include Rep of Ireland) can in physical geography be referred to as Britain, too. The bit I "revised" yesterday was the 4 historical Irish provinces (+ Dublin) - I'd forgotten that that "Ulster" and "Northern Ireland" have different definitions, with Ulster actually including 3 counties in the Republic. Remember what is now the Republic of Ireland was until ~100 years ago part of the UK. [still not being political - just saying...] Ironic name sometimes, the UK - given that we're not always very united (remind me to come back and revise this if there's another independence referendum in Scotland or Wales), and have only had a king as opposed to a queen for 51 of the last 182 years... as for the Great in GB, that's just from the French "Grande Bretagne" - yes, we're just Big Brittany. Something quite rarely seen is an outline map of England all on its own - google it and you'll see most are of Britain, the UK or the British Isles. Dead simple, this "being an island with no borders" game...