AndyFriend

I am thinking of giving a coin away but do not know how to use the adoption features. In fact I could not even find a link for doing this. Please help.

I found my first geocoin recently while on vacation in Las Vegas. Not knowing what it was, I planned to keep it, thinking it was an amazing treasure. Then I noticed it had an alphanumeric code on it like the travel bugs I had seen. I was able to quickly confirm this on geocaching.com, and did not keep the coin. Since I almost took someone elses coin and since my parents did take someone elses coin with out knowing, I just assumed that much of the problem could be with new cachers. The cachers I have met have been really nice people, and I was hoping that the missing coins were more of a product of accident than dishonesty.

There are two points I would like to make. The first is that new geocachers are not being informed about geocoins. I got my parents into this back in January when I first heard of geocaching. I knew nothing of travel bugs & geocoins, so I was not able to explain them to my parents. They found a coin (trackable on some other website) and thought it was a neat treasure and kept it. Now that I have given a geocoin to them and explained what they are about, they released the coin they found back into circulation. They had the coin for about 4 or 5 months before it was put back into circulation. They had no idea. This may be a common occurrence also. Maybe it would help if geocaching.com would put an image of a geocoin on their home page with a statement like "For Moving from Cache to Cache and Not for Keeping", new cachers would learn about them sooner. The second point is more of an idea. If every geocacher/geocaching team left one unactivated coin for someone to find and keep as their own, there may be less stealing. Especially if a note was included saying something like "This coin is unactivated and is now yours. Please do not keep any activated coins". This way people would find really cool treasures and also be somewhat educated about the nature of geocoins.