MarkandKumiko

Thank you and that is great advice. The CO for several caches here is giving them up and I'm going to suggest this very idea to them. I'll update when I know.

BTW I have found someone to take over my caches in England. So that process is happening.

Thanks, I didn't think of that as an option. I will add that to the note offering it up for adoption.

Seems I'm in luck. Someone who is still here is wanting to get rid of all their caches and putting them up for adoption.

Based on the available evidence I would consider that a fair assessment of what happened. There is more to the story though. I did leave someone there to do periodic maintenance. My neighbors had three lurchers they took on very long walks daily. All of my caches were within walking distance of my house. So I explained geocaching to them and asked if they would consider taking care of them until someone adopted them. Being elderly, and not tech savvy, they didn’t have internet or cell phones, so they didn’t show any interest in geocaching themselves, but did agree to take care of mine. By the time I left England my children were becoming disheartened with geocaching. We had released six trackables around the area and five of them went missing almost immediately. Then, when we got to the states we were surrounded by micros. Micros are no fun for kids. So we basically stopped caching altogether. My children grew up and I got divorced. So I was on my own and geocaching by yourself is no fun. I never came back to the sight and eventually forgot all about my caches. In the meantime Shirley, my neighbor, fell ill and was no longer able to take those long walks with their dogs. So they stopped maintaining them. So yes, I technically did abandon them, but I did have a plan. I just didn’t keep track of it. Not to mention I offered them up for adoption. The people who leave the island don’t do that. Now fast forward to Thanksgiving 2017. I’m sitting at a traffic light with my girlfriend and the car in front of me has a trackable sticker on it. So I took a picture of it and explained geocaching to Kumiko. She was interested so we went home and logged the find. I looked at the map and saw there were several within walking distance of my house. We gathered up a few things and went off in search of them. She was immediately hooked. Not so much for the micros. I mean who does enjoy those? Anyway I paid for a Premium subscription and we plan on going every weekend now.

No, these aren't holiday caches. These are from people who were once stationed here. This is a common problem around military installations, but everyone here seems to be more than happy to do maintenance for abandoned caches. It's kind of expected since we are a 'community'. In fact I was somewhat chastised when I said didn't think it was right to EXPECT people to do it on someone's behalf.

I would like some thoughts on abandoned caches. I live here on cache saturated Okinawa. There are several people who have left caches here and left the island. One person boasts well over 100. The general practice here is to help these people out and do their maintenance for them. One guy even sends out a request for someone to do maintenance, which someone always does. To me I think this is a little unfair. As I said the island is saturated so there are very few, if any, places left to place a cache. Not to mention the majority of them are micros when they didn’t need to be. So those of us that are here now don’t get to enjoy the fun of placing a cache. I’ve approached a couple of owners as to the possibility of letting someone adopt their cache, as I have done when I left a cache behind. One individual’s response was they wanted to keep their caches to build their stats. IMO that’s not the right reason to be in this game. I could log a NM, but the owners just send out a request for someone local to do it for them. I’m curious as to everyone else’s thoughts on this.