Sparrowhawk

Frankly, I'd start with a whole newbies "Geocaching 101" presentation first, with proper props. "This is an ammo can." "This is a travel bug." "This is a GPS, etc." "Here are some funny stories about how fun it is." "Any questions?" THEN do the raffle.

Imaging being at a cross between a gourmet restaurant and an aircraft museum. You can dine right under the wings of historic aircraft that have fought decisive battles in history. There are hundreds of WW1 and WW2 artifacts all over the polished wood walls inside. No pics you take can do the place justice. As you dine on good seafood buffet, you get to watch HUGE jumbo jets land at the international airport - right across the street! Welcome to Mig Alley

A sad story that ended OK: 2 years ago, I went on vacation with my proud, brand-new Meriplat. I usually carried my GPS on a lanyard handing from my left hip. I usually drive a large vehicle, so no danger of it getting caught in the door or anything. So what happens? I go on vacation, rent a small car, find my first cache of the day, got back in the car... ...and the corner of the car door went crunch on the new Meriplat. Broken screen. Well I cried for help on geocaching.com, and a local named Lyndy felt my pain and loaned me his Rino. Lyndy saved my vacation!!! MY HERO!! I cached down to Mt. Palomar and down in San Diego and back up again. I was EXTREMELY grateful. I returned the Rino and made sure that Lindy got one of my hand-made Star Collage t-shirts before I went home. A year later, I sold the busted Meriplat on Ebay to an Australian who had a similar unit with a good screen and busted electronics. He was able to assemble a whole unit out of the 2 broken ones. He was happy, I was happy.

Please post cache names and links with your pics so I know what to add to my watchist!

From my watchlist: Scattered Remains The cache is in the scattered remains of an abandoned industrial complex dating to about 60 years ago. They made gunpowder there. Things went kaboom there and the place has since been abandoned. Now it is a Twilight-Zone-ish location where old buildings and fire hydrants hide among the trees. PA Turnpike Cache #1 An abandoned turnpike! With tunnels! The Pipeline And last but not least, a geocache I visited that impressed me SO much, I made a commemorative T-shirt design out of it! Post pics of your most unexpected "...would not have known this was here if it wasn't for Geocaching!" stories and photos.

Heck, why not? The more the merrier.

Also be sure to let folks know that you are open to ideas on the event itself... that should help increase interest. Personally, I think the cache event should reflect a "newbies welcome" kinda thing in the title. Also hold an interim event at a pub or restaurant 2 weeks before the event as a planning meeting.

How to solve a pickle park situation: - Plant poison ivy in the tryst areas. - Plant nettles there too - get concentrated habenero powder, spread around any obvious "horizontal closeness" locations. - Leave road kill in the area - get skunk scent and spray it all over the area Then get the heck out. (not actually advocating doing any of these... but a person can THINK about it... )

If a cache needs cleanout and maintenance of any kind, I will do so. I carry extra tupperware for this purpose in case I find a broken cache container. My cache bag has spare ziplocks, spare pens, spare logbooks, and spare swag. Anything helps.

Easist way to get a group going anywhere: Pick a local pub, declare a cache event get-together. Voila! Instant local group!

I have an orange vest with TNLNSL in big, official-looking letters on the back.

Well, it looks like my schedule simply does not allow me to set up anything as fancy as my original idea, or as well-organized as the idea above... but I can at least arrange SOMEthing, make it low-key and easy to deal with, and see about making it cool from there. Any other ideas are appreciated... thanks for the help so far.

Modification of idea: This would be in Portland. It would be on a Sunday, starting with a breakfast place on Sandy Blvd. Then we'd work our way south, end up at the Original Stash, and celebrate at some pub in Oregon City. That way, if you only have the morning or the evening to hang out, you can choose breakfast or dinner with geocachers. Just brainstorming...

I have been talking to someone new to geocaching, and they had a lot of questions, such as wanting to see a GPS in action, different models of GPSr units, questions about geocaching, etc. My unit is a Meriplat. Works fine for me... but I wondered if it was fair for him to just get an impression based on that. Then I had a cool idea. A special "Welcome Newbies!" cache event. It would work like this: A sort of mini cache machine, consisting of at least 5 impressive caches within a 5 mile radius. Mix it up a bit, maybe a micro, maybe a simple puzzle cache, and at least 3 "wow, didn't know THIS was here!" cool-location caches. The newbies get to look for the caches while the veterans get to hang out and be encouraging. Lots of postive vibes. Then afterwards, a get-together in a pub. Cool idea or not? How to improve it if it could work? All ideas are welcome.

Hmmmm... I am a geek, and I just dreamed up a cool way to make a cache for the blind. Go bribe a radio geek to build a transmitter to transmit a low-power AM signal, right at the bottom or the top of the AM band. Put transmitter into cache box. Hide box. Blind geocacher is to bring a transistor radio with a long antenna. Figure it out from there.

My "Bug-eyed Sunglasses" Basically, they are gray, plastic sunglasses with big, round lenses that look like a fashion mistake from the 70's. I LOVE them for driving into the sunset light. I wore them once when my friend was driving. He told me they were dangerous for driving, take them off, please. I said, but I'm in the passenger seat, what are you talking about? Then he clarified... they were so rediculous-looking they interfered with other people's driving... one look at me with them on and they'd run off the road.

Contact me, and I will show you some of the best caching spots in PDX.

OK... I now know that this may not be an appropriate post, rather not risk it just in case, mods please delete this thread. Thanks.

I once had a job interview where I was to operate some very expensive machine with a keyboard for typing that had some sort of focused ray to etch messages into diamonds. Didn't get the job, but the memory sparks a funny idea. Same thing, but you can use it to type your "found it!" log on a tiny piece of quartz or something. Now THAT would be a NANO cache!

What forum software is this forum made of? I am impressed by it. What website is in charge of the software? I have my own domain. I want to start my own forum for folks who do business travel, since I cannot for the life of me find a cool forum like this for folks who fly as part of their job. (I dream of getting a job like that, even if I land in "name of 4th-rate-city here", it's still part of the dream) Whatever software makes this geocaching forum happen could be what I need, and I have a web-geek who can make it happen. Thems in charge of the forums, please give me a referral to thems in charge of the software.

I don't geocache as often as I could simply because my motivation is excellent location more than anything... and it's too difficult to tell which caches are good for location uniqueness and quality. I am discouraged from geocaching a lot because I cannot sort by quality of location from looking the cache pages. I still cache some... not a whole lot. If I am lucky enough to see by the logs that folks really love the interesting location, that makes it better. But I don't have time to look at all the logs on lots of cache pages just to find the one "wow, didn't know THIS was here!" kind of cache that makes me glad to go geocaching.

I sometimes see people complaining about "Lame caches". Doesn't seem like there is a concensus as to what REALLY constitutes a lame cache. So here is a poll: What are the top 3 lameness factors that make for a lame cache for you? My own top 3 "lameness" factors: 3: nano-caches 2: Badly or non-maintained caches, no owner response whatsoever And the number one lame-cache factor for me: 1: Boring location, nothing really new or unique to discover or learn

If you don't like TB hotel caches with restrictive rules, just create a travel bug to break those rules.

Hey! I resemble that remark!

Easy answer. Sit down next to the geomuggle. Look despondent. Complain that you lost your roll of 50 dollar bills in that area on the other side of the lot, and you been searching and just gave up. Chat a little while longer, then wander off. Wander back in a few minutes. They will be outta there, and you can cache in peace.