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NevaP

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Everything posted by NevaP

  1. Thnaks to everybody who has offered to help me caching in SA. We fly out of Chicago Sunday AM. It will be an exciting trip.
  2. Hi all of you down there. Greetings from Lincoln, Nebraska USA. We will be making our first visit to Africa, June 22 to July 15. We will be in Durban, July 6-12 attending the International Congress of Entomology. At the last International Congress in Brisbane, Australia, 2004 I released two Travel Bugs, ICE Beetle andICE Mantid . They both did quite well, racking up 33,328 and 24,600 miles before encountering difficulties in the last year. But they survived (well, the beetle's tag did), are home, and retired. I want to turn loose a couple new bugs , preferably in the Durban vicinity, but I'm having trouble finding caches within walking distance to our Golden Mile hotel, which are big enough to hold a bug and not too tricky to find in limited time. I'll do smallish bugs but I need at least a decon can sized cache. Stuken Gardens is the closest to our hotel and it seems to be missing. Everything else I can find close is a micro or a complicated multi. We will have a car for a few days, July12-14, and we will be staying at a B&B in Nottingham Road. I did spot a couple small caches, Happy Hill and Waterbend, on the way there. The earlier part of the trip, before Durban is a week of *SERIOUS* birding in the western Cape and north of Pretoria, followed by a standard four day Kruger Park - see- the -elephants tour. When you are hiring bird guides at $$$ a day you don't waste their time looking for caches. I will have caches in my GPS but I won't be looking for them unless I find myself right on top of them when there is no interesting bird in view. So I am open to any advice about caches in Durban and even wondering if maybe someone there could meet me and grab the bugs. Thanks and happy caching to all, NevaP
  3. I love travel bugs. Yes, I had to learn not to get emotionally attracted to them. I tend to personify them and create stories for them. (one of these years I may decided what I'm going to be when I grow up) The best solution to this is have a lot of them and start a new one when one goes AWOL. I a bit over five years I have launched 36 TBs and 5 coins (a modest number - lots of people have more). !7 TBs and one coin have gone missing and a couple others are probably in trouble at the moment. But collectively my trackables have visited 49 states plus the District of Columbia (Can't get anybody to ND) and have reached 9 countries other than USA. One has logged over 30,000 miles, 3 over 20,000 and 4 0ver 10,000. If the weather ever warms up I'm going to get a bunch more released this spring.
  4. Just did the survey. Thought you needed the input of a senior citizen female. (And I do hope the person who posted just ahead of me is joking)
  5. For your campground zip code just check a map and look up the nearest town. Almost every dot on the map has a zip code. Premium membership is a great thing. We just returned from a 4000 miles, driving to California and back trip, and I think I found every rest stop cache along the way. I ran route PQs ahead of time, plugged it all in a GSAK database and generated streets and trips maps. Then I compared the push pins for caches with road maps to spot the ones that appeared to be in rest areas. In pre caches along a route days I used to look at the maps ahead of time and run PQs for circles around towns that would catch the rest areas. Route PQs greatly simplified all this. Last year I upgraded to a GPS with huge storage card capacity so for this trip I ran a lot of PQs covering every where we might be and tossed several thousand of the on the card and also loaded the cache information into my pocket PC. I did have a number of specific interesting hike to caches located and I went after many of these but when we stopped for the night or to get gas or to sight see I would pull out the GPS and see if anything interesting was nearby. A number of time a quick grab turned up close. We did deviate from the projected route enough one night to not have the area covered but I had the laptop along and the motel had wireless so I was able to call up a few local caches and I missed an FTF by an hour or two. And I'm not a tech geek. I'm just a senior citizen who still thinks its all done by magic. Keep working at it and you too will learn how to do all this stuff.
  6. I decided I better do the jock test too and the result was about what I expected. 91.8 % pure, 8.2% jock. But they don't give credit for frequently bushwacking through forests and up and down gullies looking for ammo cans and Tupperware boxes.
  7. 32.34714% I got to check five boxes for bring female which raised the score. But I think I should have had have five more bonus ones for being almost 73 years old. I was a geek before the word was invented.
  8. So what's new about all this anyway? For 53 years of my life I have been a birder, an activity that often involves rising at dawn to sit in a swamp, tramping for hours in rain or sub-zero temperatures and traveling to remote areas in hopes of seeing a bird I haven't ever seen before, or seeing birds I've seen a gazillion times before or just watching very common birds do whatever they do. People who don't do this think I'm nuts. But when I'm with other birders we have a great time talking about, and doing our obsession. For 26 years of my life I've been a serious needleworker, which involves many hours of sitting with a powerful lamp, a magnifier, a frame holder, a multitude of gadgets and threads, doing tiny intricate stitches producing beautiful items which then clutter up my house. It also involves taking many classes and traveling to seminars and workshops to learn and practice new stitching techniques. People who don't do this think I'm nuts. But when I'm with other needleworkers we have a great time talking about and doing our work. For 4 and a half years of my life I have been a geocacher which as you all know involves learning new technology and acquiring gadgets, tramping through all sorts of places, peering under park benches and lifting lamppost bases , traveling as much as possible to up my stats, all to sign logbooks and/or collect cheap trinkets. People who don't do this think I'm nuts. But when I'm with other cachers we have a great time talking about our finds and looking for new ones. Now I'm sure you can all think of hundreds of other activities which you may or may not do or which your friends, enemies and relatives may or may not do, which can be described in a similar manner. The point I'm making is that the world would be a dull place if we all did exactly the same thing. Enjoy what you do. Don't worry about what other people do or don't do and don't worry about what they think about what you do.
  9. If anybody else is looking this stuff up be sure you get the most recent information. I have been given links to a lot of out of date pages. Look for a March or April 2007 date. The most recent advisories are: no limitations on cell phones. GPS receivers should be declared in customs but advance permission isn't needed any more.
  10. I received some useful, up to date , information from a cacher who recently logged caches in Russia: >The Russian government recently changed the rules (within the last >year) and it appears all you need to do is to declare the GPS unit on >your customs declaration form and go through the "red" line at >customs. After that I wouldn't be too worried about it - just make >sure you have the declaration form with your GPS. So I probably will take a GPS, (the second or third back-up one, not my full bells and whistles model). I won 't use it around Military installations ( I don't expect to be near any) and will mainly be Waymarking old churches and such. But I might need to be cautious about Waymarking the locks the cruise ship will pass through. (And I won't lift any lamp post skirts )
  11. I just read the following warning on the State Dept. Travel advisor site: >The importation and use of Global Positioning Systems and other radio electronic devices are subject to >special rules and regulations in Russia. In general, mapping and natural resource data collection activities >associated with normal, commercial, and scientific collaboration may result in seizure of the equipment >and/or arrest of the user. >No traveler should seek to import or use GPS equipment in any manner unless it has been properly and >fully documented by the traveler in accordance with the instructions of the Glavgossvyaznadzor (Main >Inspectorate in Communications) and is declared in full on a customs declaration at the point of entry to >the Russian Federation. Anybody here have any experience traveling in Russia with a GPS? There are a few caches there. We will be on a tourist trip in August. Moscow to St Petersburg , traveling between to the two cities on a river cruise ship. I have only a couple geocaching I could look for but there are many Waymarking possibilities. I hope to use a GPS. Any words of wisdom?
  12. A friend sugested these as cache container a couple years ago. She saves them for me. I've hidden several and yes, they do make good micro containers.
  13. Come on you kids! I'm one of the 2 in the 71-80 bracket and assuming I stay as healthy as my dad and most of my other relatives I expect to still be out there at 90+. But I might not do the five mile hike in the mountains caches anymore. And just last week I decided not to climb 20 feet up in a magnolia tree to retrieve a cache I could see up there (NOT a suspended one) North Campus Bookstore There are plenty of 1-2-3 terrain caches to keep us busy and more seniors than you think out there looking for them. But most of us are to busy to spend much time in the forums so I suspect the poll numbers are a bit low on the upper end.
  14. Lead upward to the peaks; and there I feel, pushing my ribs apart, The wide sky entering my heart. "Roads" Bryon Herbert Reece I just ran across this today, while googling up information about this Appalachian Mountain poet. I have to admit I had never heard of him until I did a Waymark for a Georgia Historical Marker I found last week.
  15. I log a DNF for every cache I've actually looked for, even briefly. I don't log for caches that were on my list of "ones I might try for today" but I didn't look for because it started sleeting, I was running out of gas, 5000 muggles were having a picnic at the site, I decided I didn't have time to do a 3 mile hike, husband is saying "We still have 200 miles to drive today" as I eye that tank in the park across from the gas station, etc.etc.etc. I even log DNFs for caches I can see but choose not to retrieve. It's up there!
  16. Either not very many people my age are caching or they aren't bothering to read the forums and do polls. (Two of us in there so far.) Probably the latter - to busy trying to understand the Medicare prescription plans.
  17. I am the owner of the Nebraska Delorme Challenge Cache. I spent some time yesterday in polite e-mail conversation with the PTB at Groundspeak clarifying how we handle our cache container and log. We had been taking it to events where those who had completed the challenge signed the log but to comply with the guidelines that ban moving caches we will no longer do this. The cache will continue to reside at the given coordinates (which are my backyard) and it will now stay there and be available 24/7. It's fastened to a tree with a bicycle cord and it's padlocked. Only those who have completed the challenge get the combination for the padlock. We will continue to maintain an unofficial fancy logbook, which resides in a decorated container, which will travel to recognition events where verified Delorme Challenge loggers may record more lengthy descriptions of their adventures if they wish to do so. But the official log is the one in the locked backyard container and it must be signed at that location. I think a challenge cache, Delorme, county or whatever is about doing the challenge and not finding the final cache. It's a recognition of caching achievement. That's why I chose the easy to find padlocked container and I think this is an acceptable alternative to one put somewhere with secret coordinates. Someone mentioned that they wanted the final container to be a good hunt. Out here in the hinterlands doing a Delorme or County challenge takes a good deal of effort. For Nebraska it means driving 2000 to 3000 miles and traversing some iffy back roads because some of our caches, the only one in a county or on a Delorme page, are in somewhat remote areas. When the required caches have finally been found (65 for our Delorme, 93 for our County challenge) the cacher doesn't seem to mind that the final cache is as we birders say, a gimme. I realize that people in small states with fewer caches to find might want a good one for the final log. I do think Groundspeak needs to consider guidelines for challenge and compilation caches as these are becoming more numerous and popular.
  18. Absolutely right! I remember my first one too. I own a lamppost cache (they are not really common in our city because we have relatively few skirted posts) which I hid mainly to annoy my daughter who at the time parked next to it. But it gets a lot of logs and a number of them comment on the clever hide. So we need these to give new cachers a bit of urban caching fun. They also come in handy if you have limited time and want a cache for your city, county, state, Quest game, whatever list, or you are trying to do a marathon record run.
  19. Congrats to CYBret for this momentous milestone. After checking my stats a bit I find I really need to just maintain my pace to hit 2008/2009 on 12/31/08 and 1/109. I'm at 1205, found 391 in 2005 and 338 in 2006 (slowed for a couple months by broken ankle). Dagnab it, I will be obsessing about this for the next two years!
  20. My EntSoc Bug One was released in Florida, Nov. 2002 with a goal of getting to future entomology meetings. It made to the International Congress Of Entomology in Brisbane in August 2004, came back to the USA, was MIA for about a year and is now trying to get to more entomology meetings. Nine other EntSoc bugs, released, 2003-2006 have not managed to get to any entomology meetings. Longing for London was released in Nebraska in August 2003 and reached its goal of London,England in only eight months.
  21. The Journal My log. Nine hours, Nine miles, seven sets of coordinates to locate, two major puzzles, five or six lesser puzzles, a maze of confusing trails, river bluff and ravines, up and down terrain, but we did it in one day.
  22. I've never had any trouble getting them on AOL. Once in a while a rerun of an old query is slow but I think these go to the bottom of the stack. New ones always seem to come in minutes. I do check the preview when I set up a PQ to see if I accidently did something that results in zero caches.
  23. I logged 14 caches in Australia. We were there for 6 weeks but the emphasis was on birding and when you are paying a bird guide $$$ a day you don't waste time looking for caches. But I did find several in Brisbane (one of which contained a travel bug of mine which had started out in Florida two years earlier and had fulfilled it's goal of getting to the site of an International Congress of Entomology) and a few more at scattered places around the east half of the country. Caches are mostly concentrated in the more populated areas. There are very few in the outback, which is most of Australia. We had our best days caching when we drove to and from Melbourne to Deniliquin, a small town on the edge of the outback. There were number of nice caches in the farming country along the 200 mile route. A couple of these are among my favorite caches anywhere. I thinkMelbourne's first is now the oldest active cache in Australia. Irish Memories is typical of the multi caches that were common here. A great country to travel in (they speak English sort of), it's not all that hard to drive on the wrong side of the road and you are likely to share cache sites with a number of interesting birds and marsupials. The view from Melbourne's First
  24. I can only hope that mine will wander a long time and do its public awareness thing while trying to get to Dhandhuka, India. The nearest cache , one of eight within 500 miles, is 243.5 miles away. (it was logged last week )
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