Geocaching Bucket List

Here are some of my top goals:

• Find 10,000 Caches
• Go to a Megaevent
• Complete the Geocaching Triad (APE cache, HQ and Original Stash)
• Find both remaining APE caches
• Find a cache on all 7 continents
• Find a cache near all 14 wonders of the world (natural and man-made)
• Find a cache in 50 different countries
• Go to an event in a foreign country
• Get a cache in every state of the US
• Get a cache in every province of Canada
• Find a true 5x5 cache
• Do a scuba diving cache
• Get the ISS cache!
• Fill out my Difficulty/Terrain Rating Chart
• Fill out my Date Chart

What about you? Do you have any big geocaching dreams?

Trying Waymarking

Today I decided to try out Waymarking again. Let me just give the problems.

• Categories. There are FAR too many. I'm just going to pick a few at random:

1. 7-Eleven Stores
2. Dedicated Benches
3. Butterfly Gardens
4. Wikipedia Entries
5. Traffic Parks

 By having sooooo many categories they completely water down what waymarks are worth. I probably went past 100 on my way home today. Think about FTF hounds and how many times caches are found. Would you be surprised to learn that some waymarks are never found at all? Or haven't been found in 6 years? And these are in communities, not mountain tops.

• Finding Waymarks.  Why isn't there a map function like Geocaching.com? Oh this is why...
• Only one Category per waymark. So for, lets say, the Empire State Building. There is probably 10 different waymarks, at least. One for wikipedia, one for New York Skyscrapers, one for New York Buildings, one for Famous Landmarks, one for 1930s architecture, etc. etc. (I'm just guessing but wouldn't be surprised at all).  I've already got 26 visits for only doing Niagara Falls, Hollywood and the Queen Mary.

• Waymarks. Can someone tell me what the difference between Beverly Hills, California and Beverly Hills, CA.? Because they're both waymarks.

•  Categories. Did I talk about this before? It needs repeating. Here are the sites own statistics: Over 1000 categories for over 300,000 waymarks. Geocaching meanwhile has over a million caches and only 15 categories. Most of which are barely used.

There has been chatter that waymarking and geocaching are going to be merged. That obviously cannot happen. There's just way to many categories now. The question then becomes: Can Waymarking be saved? The answer: Probably not. The first thing they'd have to do is make multi-categoried Waymarks but from my experiences in web development it seems like that would require a huge change of the websites mechanics. As it stands now the site has barely any use, ask yourself: Am I going to go and log all the 7-Eleven Waymarks?

Either the site is going to evolve and jump onto handheld devices or its going to die. That's the only way. Especially with Virtuals coming back to Geocaching as early as this Wednesday.

In depth comparison of Geocaching.com to Waymarking.com

The bounce rate is the number of times a person goes to one page and then doesn't come back.

Okay. This is not promising.

Oh god.