How did you

[+WRITE SHOP ROBERT]

Along the lines of the topic about remembering your first cache here's another question.

 

When you first came to the site and punched in your ZIP code, how did you choose the one from the list that you wanted to do first?

 

For me it was "J.O.B.L.Go Devils" and I chose that one because it was hidden at the field where my Niece played softball at the time, I just thought that was the coolest!!

[+ironman114]

It may have been the closest one at that time. But I also knew from the description exactly where to look.

 

Just to make things harder and make me use my gps I waited till dark to go look for it. That way I couldn't see any of the landmarks mentioned.

[+Travelinmatt76]

I was at work when I found out about geocaching. I did a search and found one a half a mile away. I pass by it everday going to work and coming home. The next one was 18 miles and all the rest are over 30 miles from home.

[+Clothahump]

My first was the closest to my home at the time. Since then, someone has placed a micro about 250 yards from my house.

[+Brianslost]

Yup, mine was the closest to where I worked at the time. I couldn't believe I had worked across the street from it for so long.

 

My first was the closest to my home at the time. Since then, someone has placed a micro about 250 yards from my house.

[+Miragee]

I can't remember exactly, but it might have been the closest to my house, less than five miles, as the crow flies. However, I had to drive about 15 miles to get to the trailhead . . . It was an ammo can beneath an artificial pile of rocks and I had a great adventure getting to it.

 

Hollenbeck Canyon Cache

 

I was instantly hooked. The rural caches are still my favorite kind, like the one I was FTF on this afternoon.

[+webscouter.]

Mine was the only one within walking distance of the house. I got my GPS from the UPS truck and my wife had the car so I had to take the one that was just a little over a mile walk. It was a micro at the base of a lightpole near a retirement home. I've been trying to avoid micros ever since.

[+mb3]

My first search was the closest to work. If I remember correctly there was one other cache in town at the time.

[+Glenn]

When you first came to the site and punched in your ZIP code, how did you choose the one from the list that you wanted to do first?

 

I didn't punch in my zipcode when I first came to the Geocaching.com website. I was living in Italy at the time. I choose the cache I did because it was the only cache within' a days drive.

[+msrubble]

It was one of the caches in a contest. It was rated 1 for difficulty. It had a parking area, and driving directions. There was a basic description of the container. There was a hint. It had been found a couple days earlier.

 

I DNFed it.

 

The second one I tried was also part of the contest, also rated 1 for difficulty, had a hint, and had been found recently. But figuring out where to park and how to get there without crossing private property took more research.

[+KoosKoos]

It was .3 miles from my house...and hidden by the guy who got me interested in geocaching. granted, we looked once after parking at the LONG side of the trail....and came home to check the map again...and then I listed to my son when he said "see dad, I told you to park there".

[+jackrock]

It wasn't the closest, it was the second closest. It was on the way to the store I needed to go to and it looked easy. It was a light pole. I didn't know about those at the time but was impressed that my GPSr took me right to it and that seemed the most likely place to look based on the cords.

[+Snoogans]

Closest to home (or what I call home for 10 months a year) for me too.

[+Too Tall John]

My first cache was one of four that were all on the same property (thanks, New England Forestry Foundation!) just a mile from home. My wife had heard about geocaching, and knew it'd be something I'd love (boy, she knows me well!).

 

We didn't even have a gps when we went for the hunt, but I picked 3 of the caches because they all had good descriptions and usable hints. I used Google Maps to get a general idea where the caches were, and off we went.

 

I haven't stopped since.

Edited March 25, 2007 by Too Tall John

[+hairball45]

That's easy, closest to the house.

[+HaLiJuSaPa]

Ironically our first find didn't involve that and is still to date the farthest from home cache we did (in fact, we didn't do another "non-local" cache for another year). We visited our brother/brother-in-law/uncle in NC and he picked the two finds and intro'd us to caching. For our first local find, our other brother/brother-in-law/uncle who lives nearby and had done it awhile took us and he did the two that were closest to his home.

[+halffast]

There were 3 within 50 miles of my home .I found the closest 1 first.Now there are 50 within 3 miles of my home.Things are changing.

[+TheAlabamaRambler]

I bought an eTrex Yellow to mark fishing holes.

 

When It came in the mail I had no idea how to use it, sat down with my friend Google for a bit of research, and found this site.

 

Looking through the list of caches close to me I recognized one by the description... it was at a hole in the fence that surrounded my old high school (the school was torn down around 30 years ago). Us reprobates and sinners had to leave school grounds to smoke, so between classes and at lunch we'd step through this hole in the fence and light up. (I am showing my age here... I think they shoot kids for that now).

 

So, I know where I am, I know where that hole in the fence is, about 12 miles away, and I know how to get there.

 

The question is will this GPS take me there if I pretend not to know the way.

 

Plug in the coordinates and off I go.

 

12 miles, maybe 8 roads and turns, and sure enough it led me to within 5 feet of the hole I hadn't been to in 35+ years, and right to a big plastic mayonnaise jar full of toys!

 

How neat is that?

 

I was instantly hooked on the GPS. It wasn't until my 3rd and 4th caches, really kewl places I had never heard of right where I grew up, that I was hooked on the game.

 

EDIT to add - that wouldn't happen today, as a PQ of 500 caches from me no longer extends 12 miles!

Edited March 25, 2007 by TheAlabamaRambler

[+Renegade Knight]

The closest cache was called Initial Point. It was hidden at Initial Point Since I didn't have a GPS. I figured I could find it based on that. Wrong. But that's how I chose my first.

[fivedime]

I didn't really choose my first find, so much as it chose me. I picked one close to my house (perhaps the closest at the time), went out and had a look, and found...nothing. Tried for some "easy" sounding hides not too far away after that....found nothing. I was starting to think this game wasn't going to be as easy as it looked at first LOL. Went back, re-read the descriptions and logs, acted on the lightbulbs that went off in my head, found a few and caught on.

 

The one I tried for first ended up being about my 4th or 5th find.

[+edscott]

It was the closest cache that was on an existing Orienteering map. I looked at a USGS and saw about where it was, drew two intersecting lines connecting landmarks that were a mile or so apart, went to the crossing point and signed in.

[+Instant Coffee]

I chose my first cache because it had a travel bug (SPONGE GEO BOB) and I was going south and wanted to move it. Both caches took me forever to find (felt like hours and probably was).

[+The Leprechauns]

When I did a zipcode search, Bonnie Blink showed up in the nature center across the road from our townhouse complex. It is a nice nature center with mowed walking trails, birdhouses and educational programs. The cache, however, is 20 feet from the parking lot, in some rubble. My daughter and I set off on foot to search for it, even before our new GPS was shipped. We DNF'd on the first try, then decided to walk around the nature center for awhile. WE HAD NEVER BEEN THERE. That is the cool thing about geocaching, it gets you outdoors, to nice parks within miles of your house that you had only driven past until knowing that little treasures were hidden there. After walking the trails, we found the cache on our second search of ground zero.

 

Yep, it was a pretty lame cache. But who knows? If there hadn't been one so close, would I have gotten hooked?

[+Thrak]

I chose my first cache GCMCD2 BoBoLu's Hot Cache because my neighbor Bob told me about geocaching and it was one of his hides.

 

The first day he mentioned geocaching I went home and made an account here and started reading the forums. By the time my GPSr was delivered I already had GSAK installed and caches ready to load. I went out and found the cache - an ammo can in a dead tree - and just sat there being mind boggled that this thing had been sitting around for so long without anybody knowing it was there. I traded some swag and left as a changed person. I found that first cache August 8, 2005 and just did #850 today. Yesterday I got my 90th FTF. I like it!

[+The Jester]

I had such a wide choice to choose from ... back then there were about 2000 world-wide. I chose ...and a whimper because it was on a trail I used all the time for training. I'm surprised I found it, as my GPSr was set to NAD27.

[+teribear68]

It was hidden at the church where my husband and I got married.

[Dinoprophet]

Closest to home. But I also didn't have a lot of choice at the time.

[+PJPeters]

I chose one in the park across the road from home. Fortunately, it was one of the easy ones. There are a few that are darn near impossible in there.

Now, I'm hopelessly hooked on this. I even took a couple buddies out with their kids yesterday, and ended up helping a fellow cacher find his second hide. He'd picked a pretty devious hide to find, and I took pity on him.

[+StarBrand]

Easy - it was the only one within 80 miles of here.

[+Kealia]

When you first came to the site and punched in your ZIP code, how did you choose the one from the list that you wanted to do first?

 

I plugged in my actual home coords (after playing the the GPS) and just went for the closest cache. After that, I went for the next closest, etc. until I really got the hang of it and started looking for caches that sounded interesting (not just based on distance).

[+Driver Carries Cache]

First find was just geographically the closest to my caching buddy's house. Funny thing is the closest one to my house (only 127 feet away) waited until #19!

 

Driver Carries Cache

(madmike)

[+Jhwk]

"goto" next closest cache.

 

that seems kind of sad.

 

actually, I jumped on GC and looked up my area code. As I had to wait for x-mas (and didn't want to wait for x-mas ) I found a cache that I thought I knew generally where it was. So I hopped in the car with the kids, and off we went.

 

from there it was just a matter of brute force and ignorance...

 

 

mainly ignorance

[+lals cache]

We picked the one closest to our house. Considering we were new, had no GPS and no real idea what we were doing, we did alright. Fortunately for us the coordinates were good and we could see the hiding place ( an old gun) on the Google map. Any other site would have been more difficult.

[+clatmandu]

It was the closest to work. Tried it one day after work, kept loosing signal in the woods,( older gpsr's oly track 8 birds), so came back the following day armed with the gpsr and a compass. Had no trouble finding it. FTF too.

[+AKStafford]

In June of 2004, we had a special guest speaker at our church. Before a Saturday night service we were all hanging out, and checking out stuff in Google Earth. He had us look at his house in Oregon, and then told me to go to www.geocaching.com. He had done a dozen or so caches, and had his GPS with him. After service (at about 10pm) we headed out to hit one in a park about 6 miles away. At the time it was one of the few in our area. Being in Alaska in the summer, it was still light out, and the mosquitoes were horrible.

The cache was .3 miles down a trail system, and my wife was the one who bagged it.

After church the next morning we hit 3 or 4 more in the mountains behind town, and we were totally hooked.

We are on find number 155 right now. The guy that introduced us has only done a handful since then.

Cache on!!

[+batsgonemad and his squirrel]

our first cache was at our botanical gardens, seemed like a nice place to go caching.

7 months went by before i found my next.

[+MN Hunter]

My first found cache was actually the 3rd one I looked for. Found it in the middle of a grassy area. I did find the first 2 I DNF, both of them were micros and I wasn't sure what to look for at first.

[+Markwell]

When I started, there were only 8 caches in a 20 mile radius. I had a day off to get my license renewed, and there was a cache near where I was going. Found it.

 

Second cache was less than a mile from my office. Third cache was half-way between work and home.

 

In those first couple of months I found 6/8 of those caches. But by that time I had placed four of my own and hosted the first event. Still - even with those - there were less than 15 caches within 20 miles of home.

 

Now, there's 984 within 20 miles of home.

[+samven]

I was going to a new HMO center for a Dr. visit and noticed when I pulled in that I was parked almost on top of a tresure marker. After the Dr. visit I came out and walked accross the parking lot with my GPS and ran head long into a lamp post. After looking around a little I decided it had to be the light pole, and it was under a cover at the base.

I remember it like it was yesterday but it was actually the day before yesterday.

Edited March 29, 2007 by samven

[tttedzeins]

It was the only one for a 200km radius

Unfortunately it is no longer there

Edited March 29, 2007 by tttedzeins

[+New Directions]

Our first one was on our new boat. It was on an island called Upper Captiva in southwest Florida near our home. Some friends had introduced us to caching. Unfortunately the cache was destroyed by Hurricane Charley in 2004.

[+Backwards Charlie from Austin]

While on an American Hiking Society trail project at an old Boy Scout camp in Ohio I got to talking with another of the people on the project about GPSrs, having just bought one before the trip. Turned out he was a geocacher but said there weren't any nearby geocaches (this was in 2003). When I told him that I had heard some guy talking to the camp manager that morning about hiding something in the camp, the geocacher got out his laptop and logged on to find that yes a cache had just been hidden in the camp that day. So we went out and found it. Thus my first cache find also turned out to be my first FTF. There were also two other caches that had been placed within an hour's drive of the camp that we went out and found the next day.

[+Airmapper]

I found Geocaching a day or two before a camping trip, so once I got over my fit of "THIS IS WAY TOO COOL HOW COME I NEVER SEEN THIS BEFORE!" I started searching around the campground and got the coords for several and printed them out.

 

Over in the area north of the campground I started to look for one, but stopped because the GPS wasn't taking me away from the road, and I didn't want to go into the weeds and get ticks all over me, so I headed on to another nearby cache. It was on a trail I had hiked before, so I went out there and started searching for a 3/3 cache hidden very well. After about 10 minutes or so I was literally right on top of it, sweating profusely, with both of my GPS units swearing it was only feet from me. I moved a rock within reach and heard metal scrape. Bingo! Been hooked ever since.

[+Knight2000]

It was the closest to our house.

 

After finding it, we realized it was a micro.

[+fairyhoney]

My first cache was before I had a GPS. So, I went by the hints.

Edited March 31, 2007 by fairyhoney

[+Allanon]

I didn't choose it...it chose me.

 

I looked for a few and was very discouraged when I stopped at one and a light bulb went off. I still begged for assistance and was helped by Totem Lake on some of the finer points of using the GPSr and making finds...and I thank him for that a lot when I'm searching...but it's definitely gotten easier.

[adm4984]

Along the lines of the topic about remembering your first cache here's another question.

 

When you first came to the site and punched in your ZIP code, how did you choose the one from the list that you wanted to do first?

 

For me it was "J.O.B.L.Go Devils" and I chose that one because it was hidden at the field where my Niece played softball at the time, I just thought that was the coolest!!

 

I chose mine b/c it was in a state park i had never been to. I did have to do a little bushwhacking which was interesting with my 1 year old. I just folded his stroller up and hid it behind a tree! Problem solved!!

[+Mocadeki]

Our first find was in a park that we used to go to but in an area that we'd never been in. It seemed interesting and is still one of our favorites. I chose that one because it seemed pretty challenging and I thought that would be the best way to get Molly hooked on caching... It worked!

[vtmtnman]

Closest to the house.The next closest one is not even in my town,so I started off with a multi for my first.Haven't been able to shake the bug since...

[+Harry Dolphin]

I chose 2/3.5 cache for my first attempt. And it's 19.2 miles from home. But it's in an area where I hiked a lot, and only a short distance off the trail that I maintain. So, I figured I wouldn't be wasting too much time if I didn't find it. And it's a beautiful area. Start off with the best!