cimawr

Brought them out from where? I don't think we HAVE "backcountry" in Maryland - certainly not like you have in Colorado! Oh, and to give you context for "it's starting to get chilly" - the temps lately have been in the 50-to-70 degree range during the day, maybe down to 40 at night. Today, however, it was in the low 80s and at midnight it's 59 degrees.

Exactly. Especially if you're not wearing cotton NEXT TO THE SKIN in cold weather, and have put on a waterproof or wool outer layer if the weather's wet. I worked for nearly four years on a job which required being out in the woods & fields EVERY DAY for 1-4 hours, regardless of weather, and never wore anything but jeans... with appropriate under and over layers. That includes, btw, being out in the absolute worst of Maryland weather, namely torrents of pouring rain with temps hovering at 34-35 degrees. Wool next to the skin on top, wool socks, wool cap with a baseball cap over it, thermals, jeans, and Frogg Toggs over all worked just fine. And the OP already specified the intent to be sane enough to STAY HOME in such weather. I don't think Maryland HAS any caches that would take you "further from civilization than you could crawl with a broken leg"... although I'm sure somebody will find a cache to post that contradicts me.

I will add, however, that I should have specified that when wearing jeans in layers, they should be loose-fitting. I think you also missed the part where I advised wearing WOOL for wet weather.

Hasn't killed me yet, even when I've gotten soaked. The OP was very clear that s/he doesn't intend to go out in extreme weather.

In Maryland, even in the dead of winter, unless you're a construction worker in wet weather, a Carhatt suit will result in drowning in sweat. It doesn't usually get below about 20 here, and winter days in the 40 to 50 degree range are common.

It depends on what sort of cache I'm hunting. If it's an urban micro or small out in the open, where stealth is needed but I'll be parked close, nothing but the GPS in its belt clip so I can attach it to my front pocket when I need to use my hands. I'll carry the cache back to the car, sign etc., then make a return trip to replace the cache. If it's an urban micro that's reasonably out of sight, same as above with the GPS, and I stick a pen in my back pocket. If it's urban but small, same as above, I'll add a couple of small "swag" or trade items in my pockets . For caches requiring actual walking or hiking, I have a small backpack (as small or smaller than many women's pocketbooks.) Small front pocket accomodates my cell phone & some small notecards. Larger front pocket carries pens, a small Sharpie, the GPS if need be, my car keys, and extra batteries. Inside pocket carries pick-up bags & a tennis ball (I cache with my dogs), a removable water resistant pouch which contains trade items, TBs, geocoins, a few Ziplocs etc.. I also sometimes add my point-and-shoot digital camera. In a pinch, I can fit my Nikon DSLR in there, but that usually gets carried seperately if I decide it's worth dealing with the weight. If I were going on a hike longer than 2-4 hours, or going into serious terrain, I would probably use a larger backpack and take water and a larger first aid kit. And one of these days I'll get around to getting a better compass than the little one on my car keys.

Well, I've only been caching since August, but I've been hiking in Maryland, in all weathers, for about 30 years (and in PA for years before that; my father started taking me hiking when I was about 6). I also do outdoor agility trials in all weather. For dry cold weather, you don't need fancy or expensive "hiking pants"; blue jeans are just as good as in the summer, you just need to put layers UNDER them; thermal underwear, or tights and then thermals for really cold weather. Flannel-lined jeans are useful. Same for the top - you want layers so that as you heat up and cool down as your activity level varies, you can adjust. If you're concerned about beating the clothes up, go to your local thrift store or buy them on eBay. I trash clothes going out with the dogs, so I refuse to spend more than $10 on a pair of jeans. SOCKS, however, I will invest in; you can't go wrong with Smartwool. For WET cold weather (far too common around here), just add a lightweight waterproof layer on top... or wear wool.

I have a friend whose mother put HER mother's cremains under the seat of the car, saying "Well, she always complained she never got to go anywhere, now she can travel around." (I gather that they'd always had something of a turbulent relationship. ) When she, in turn, passed on a few years later, he put both sets of cremains side by side on the mantelpiece so the two of them could continue to squabble.... No, I am NOT making this up! Yes, my friend inherited his twisted sense of humor from his mother.

Any and every member of the public has the right to be near a playground which is part of a public park. Whether or not your actions will be seen as suspicious will depend on the time you choose to go there, and whether you adjust your actions to the circumstances. Admittedly, being a just-under 5' 40-something female who caches with dogs, I'm less likely to be seen as "suspicious" than, for example, my caching S.O. who's 6', over 200 lbs, and has long hair, but I still have sense enough to adjust my actions if I get to a cache spot and find a playground full of kids nearby. Of course, it ALSO helps if the cache hider discloses on the cache page that there may be such nearby activity; then, I can choose to go there at a time when there are less likely to be kids. As a side note, my S.O. caches WITH his kids, and pre-visits urban caches before taking them there if he has any doubts as to the suitability of the location.

Yep! And take your cell phone, if you've got one. Even in relatively mild terrain, it's always possible to trip or slip and hurt yourself.

You can also buy individual unactivated, trackable Geocoins on eBay; however, you may pay more for them than they are worth IMO. Some are being sold by cachers who are reducing collections, most seem to be sold by speculators who sign up to buy them when they're made, then re-sell at a profit. If you DO opt to purchase a Geocoin there, make sure that: 1. the coin is clearly listed as being unactivated 2. the seller is reputable (check the feedback listings) 3. the pictures for the auction don't reveal the coin's tracking code. Also, if you're new to eBay, make sure to check the shipping charges before bidding; some unscrupulous sellers make their money by selling at low prices and jacking up the shipping. (Worst example of that I've seen was a jacket worth about $25 at the most - it was used - which was listed at $2.00 but had a $50.00 fee listed for UPS Ground shipping!)

Mam would enjoy the company, actually. More seriously, your comment goes back to mine about placement; the graveyard caches I have done have been placed so that it's not necessary to "walk over a grave" to figure out where they are. Additionally, people who are drawn to caches intended to introduce a historical or signficant graveyard are, IMO, more likely than JQP to understand the concept of not walking directly over graves, regardless of the direction the GPS is pointing. We don't drive off the street and over people's lawns to access caches, we circle around on the roads until we figure out where the road or trail is, and the same concept applies to caching in or near a cemetary.

I did two caches last weekend that are "within sight of a school", and in fact parked in the elementary school parking lot to access them. The school's in a fairly rural area, the parking lot is large, and neither cache is anywhere near the playgrounds, nor are they actually on school grounds. The day I was there, there were local teens practicing driving, and a couple of local families allowing their kids to play on the playgrounds. Even if I'd arrived during school hours, I could have parked at the lower end of the lot to access both the cache in the field across the street, and the one in the woods at the upper end of the park which abuts the school. Now, in a more suburban setting, where there's security and suspicion, those caches might be less appropriate. As it is, I have no problem with them, nor has there ever BEEN a problem - and the cache by the playing fields has been there since Dec. of 2002.

Exactly. Also, reading the two articles about the SC controversy that were posted, it became immediately obvious that one of the problems there was racial - caches being placed in historical slave graveyards, for example - and that another was disrespect, or at least the perception of it, in the way the caches were POSTED.

The statement above made me curious, so I went to geocaching.com, plugged in the coordinates of my house, and ran a 15-mile search. The result was 438 caches, many of which I'll never bother with.

Hrm. Try checking out the thread from about a week ago, entitled "Not Quite A Rant". To summarize the original post in that thread, one way in which such a cache can be a problem is when cachers are disturbing nearby homeowners to the point that they're calling police because they think the cachers are prowlers, regardless of the fact that the cache itself is not on private property.

Do a keyword search on "Maryland's Most Haunted"; there's a series of caches under that name. However, IIRC, they're mostly in Baltimore and Harford Co, which may be too far south for your purposes.

<APPLAUSE> Beautifully and perfectly stated! If you look at my profile page, you will see that one of my interests/hobbies is taphophilia. To save anyone having to look that up, it means "love of graveyards". Cemetaries and graveyards fascinate me, and always have; each stone represents a human being, reflects that person's life (death is just another stage of life) and the history of the area. Every stone or marker has a story to tell, if you pay attention. I have no problem with caches in or near cemetaries, as long as 1. they are placed peripherally (e.g. in a tree, nearby woods, in or on a building, etc.) 2. the cemetary is one that is open to the public. 3. The cache is not so difficult to find that the less reputable members of the caching community might do damage searching for it (IOW, I don't think micros are particularly appropriate) 4. the cache is not placed on a tomb or monument. WRT cachers taking pictures of themselves lying on graves, that's got NOTHING to do with the sport of geocaching, and everything to do with being immature f***wits. People like that would behave that way regardless of whether or not it was caching that brought them near a cemetary, and they undoubtedly behave with similar disrespect in other caching situations.

Hrm. Problem with THAT is, what if "their contribution" was a cache, and the remaining members can't or won't take care of them? There's a case like that in my area, where the account owns 13 caches - 5 in Maryland, 7 in Massachusetts, 1 in Kansas. Thing is, AFAICT, there's only one remaining member, who orginally lived in Maryland, and that person has moved to Kansas. Although some of the caches were supposed to be maintained by a family member who's *not* a cacher, that hasn't happened. Of the 5 Maryland ones, two are archived - by the local reviewer, not by the owners, and two, both of which I've found, are in not-very-good shape. The remaining one has been destroyed but remained listed as active for three months after it was reported destroyed. There's no question that the cache is gone, since the person who reported it had found it more than a year previously, and had made several repeat visits to drop off TBs. That particular cache is 3 miles from my S.O.'s house, so I finally e-mailed the owner.... the account e-mail bounced. I then contacted the local reviewer who changed it to unavailable two weeks ago; there has been no action or response - IOW, it, too, will soon be archived. 5 of the Mass ones were adopted for maintenance by an active Mass cacher, so those are still functional; the other two were archived by the owner (probably by the member who lived in Mass at the time s/he quit caching). Of course, that sort of thing happens with one-person accounts, too. But it does seem like one person in the account took care of the caches s/he had placed in his/her local area before leaving, and the other one didn't.

Even if it's not the FL geocoin that's coming up as unactivated, obviously y'all still need to take care of logging that one in and out correctly. Oh, and BTW - I'm not trying to give you a hard time, just giving info because it appears that you're both fairly young and new to geocaching - I also noticed that on your last cache, your log says "this cache is really small". If you go to the cache page, look on the right hand side below "Navigation" and above "Attributes", you'll see a line that says "This is a MICRO cache". Micro means "really small". Caches come in four sizes: Nano- REALLY REALLY small (can be as small as a pencil eraser) Micro - very small, only holds a log, bring your own pencil Small - will hold small items in addition to the log book Regular - will hold larger items.

Ok, I went and read back through your logs, and it looks like you're talking about the FL goecoin. I see that you didn't actually pick it up - your mother took it out of this cache: Cache where the FL geocoin is still listed on September 24, according to her log for that cache. According to her logs, she left it in this cache on September 29, without ever having figured out how to record that she'd taken it out of the original cache. You then picked it up from that cache on October 5. The Florisa coin IS clearly activated and belongs to This person. I'm not sure what y'all are doing incorrectly, but your mom needs to go the cache listing above and click on the icon for the FL geocoin that's in the "inventory" on the right side of the page. That should take her to the coin's page. On that page, she needs to do a log of the type "retrieved it from", using the code that's on the coin. If the code is some letters and some numbers, put ALL of them in, not just the numbers. Once she's done that, the coin should show up in her inventory. If she wants to just transfer it to you, you can either do a log ON THE TB PAGE that says you "grabbed it from" her - that means she gave it to you without dropping it in a cache. Or, she can go back to the cache listing where you meant to transfer it, edit her log, and drop it out of her inventory same as she would any other TB. You then need to follow the process of going to the cache's inventory and "retrieving" it from the cache.

For tracking purposes on geocaching.com, geocoins are considered TBs. You log them in and out exactly the same way you do TBs. Well, if it really is unactivated, maybe someone intended it as a gift/swag for the finder? Here's some things that may help you figure it out: 1. Check to see if the coin has printing anywhere on it that says it's trackable, and/or where it can be tracked. I've only found a few geocoins, but they all had printing on them somewhere which said "Trackable at geocaching.com". 2. Double-check the tracking number. I recently found two identical coins in one pouch (didn't realize 'til I got back to the car that I'd picked up more than one). They both had alphabetical tracking codes, and when I went in to log them, one of them kept giving me an error saying it wasn't valid. I finally realized that one of the six letters was actually the number 0 rather than the letter O. Also, if the number says something like PC1111, you need to type in the PC part - that stands for "Personal Geocoin. 3. Read back through the logs for the cache, and see if you can figure out who put it in there. Go to their profile page (you can do that by clicking on their name in the log), and send them a private message asking what their intent was.

Yep. I'm not sure I find it funny. I'm also suprised at the number of people who don't seem to have bothered to read the encrypted note.... then again, it's labeled as a "dedication", which implies that it's encrypted because it's personal. <removed spoiler space because I realized that following replies make the space useless> "Yes, this is a joke. Uncle Elwyn came from a Barenaked Ladies skit while on concert and be heard on their 1996 release "Rock Spectacle". Yes, I know this is morbid can and not funny. Yes, I know I am a bad bad Geocacher for doing this. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but then we went past the point of no return."

There's a similar series in MD - here's the cache listing for the hider, which shows them (most are on the second page): Indy-MD His are all micros AFAIK; some in the woods at a local park, some are urban. Out of curiosity, do you plan yours as micros, or as small/regular with theme items?

I don't believe that's what the OP is saying is happening. I took the post to mean that the person logs once, saying that the coin is taken, and then it's never heard of again. Which is not right. WRT the practice you're referring to, I'm glad to hear verification that it's OK; I've been carrying It's a REAL Bug from cache to cache with me & taking pictures to fulfil its mission, since it's part-owned by a little kid and it was AWOL for a year before I found it. I'm having fun, the bug is active, and the owners are enjoying the logs, so I'm taking my time before dropping it again.