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.

May I Present: The American Civil War

Last week I read a newspaper article about the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War. Nothing interests me more than history, especially military history. So immediately I wanted to know if Geocaches were in proximity to the battles. This somehow led me into making a bookmark list of them. Ten minutes later I'm opening wikipedia to do every battle. There is a LOT of Civil War battles, little did I know. It took me about 4 days to go through them all but I finished it with a total of 617 geocaches.

Bookmark List

 I made sure all of them are searchable by state (search Ten. if you looking for Tennessee) or battle name (Gettysburg or Antietam for example). There's also specific keywords like Cemetery, Tour, submarine, museum, and naval. Currently I have found zero of these caches. But someday hope to have all of them.

Some interesting ones:

GC563E The H.L. Hunley submarine cache

GCVCHC The High Bridge

GC123C One of my favourite quotes

I just couldn't help myself...

A little geocaching GPS humour:

A Proud Papa

It took awhile but I finally got the Geocache "Placing" bug. I recently placed two new caches, making my total placed caches four. This, combined with the emergence of spring, has spurred a flurry of activity in my area. Both have been found around 15 times. Pretty good considering the crappy weather we've had recently.

But I've figured out what makes placing caches so fun for me. The logs! My first solo cache was floating around in my head for awhile and I finally took the plunge. I got my cache (micro) ready and got my GPS and I was off. I spent only maybe a half hour or so looking for the best possible spot which unfortunately was hard to come by since all the major branches in the area were cut down and the hook for my cache to hang with was too small. At last I spotted a place (at the time I thought I was settling, now I realize it was perfect) and got my coordinates (I also double checked them).

After submitting it and having it go live I waited to see the response it would get. So far it's been really positive! Most saying they enjoyed the cache or that the coordinates were dead on. And that means a lot coming from cachers who have almost 4000 finds! Both my new caches have people who submitted pictures and someone also used my cache for their 100th cache milestone!

It's a strange feeling of pride. Like the caches are my children and I'm the proud father or something. Placing your own caches is a rewarding experience for sure. And to me it emphasizes that if your going to be placing caches, do it right!

(Also, try to be nice in your logs ;) )

Geocache Season has Begun!

At "Hockey Cache In Canada - Gretzky #99 (Revisited)"

Today is the first day of spring, but geocaching is already in full swing. Sharon12 and I kicked the season off in Brantford on March 2nd, grabbing excellent caches such as the first half of Coach's Crew Sails the 7 C's and March Madness! both of which 13coach13 helped create. I also finished the requirements for an Alphabet Soup, I just need to go get it!

After that was a small drought thanks to a winter "last hurrah" snow/rain storm. But I still managed to grab a few caches, including an early March FTF (which was certainly interesting), a birthday cache and introducing geocaching to someone while on a date! I was also busy publishing two caches which have thus far received very positive responses! 

Sharon12 at the Battlefield Falls Cache

Smith's Knoll Battlefield Cemetery

Finally it was the 15th and my first (in season) geocaching event of the year. Sharon12 unfortunately had to work that night but that didn't stop us from using the morning to grab some amazing caches in the Stoney Creek area of Hamilton. Of course Hamilton being the "City of Waterfalls" we got an amazing view of the Battlefield Falls. Cache of the day for us would have to go to A Tropical Drink by the legendary Blue Quasar.

One of our favs

After that I went to Brantford alone for the event and to do some caches. My first cache had unfortunate incident that had me spreading profanity non-stop. Luckily I've survived so far, but this does nothing to ease my concerns regarding the Event Curse. I mean, serious personal injury? What's left? Only broken bones and death! Anyway the cache turned out to be an FTF for me so it evens out. I got a few more caches including a my first letterbox of the year. The event itself was great, I heard a couple good stories and had a good meal. 

This Saturday was GHMGC's (Golden Horseshoe Monthly Geocaching Club) meet up in Burlington/Oakville. It was my first non-event meeting of multiple cachers and caching as a large group. It certainly made for an interesting time. After a few caches me and Sharon12 split apart from the group to get some of the most interesting caches (we were on a limited time schedule) including my first Earthcache of the year. We trooper'd through from 9 till 2:30 with no drinks or food to finish the Big Smiley Series!

Beautiful day to go caching

Overall an excellent way to celebrate my first GEOCACHE B-DAY! There is no debate that geocaching has profoundly changed my life (for the better). The people, places and things that geocaching has brought me to are unimaginable and I can't wait for more!

And its definitely not over yet, on the 30th I have another event that Sharon12 will be attending with me. And after that I'm looking into the future for possibly going to a couple CITO events, the Spring Fling mega event in Barrie and the Geobash mega event in New York!

Happy caching!

Idea for 11/11/11 Event

UPDATE: Not happening because of Remembrance Day I guess, maybe 12/12/12

Last year for 10/10/10 Groundspeak held a "event" where all cachers were encouraged to log at least one cache that day in an attempt to set a record for most caches. Cachers were promised a new Souvenir. It succeeded and thousands participated. For the Groundspeak this must have been exciting, however for your average cacher the results were only shown through given statistics and the Lost & Found video.

So what can Groundspeak do for 11/11/11 that can top 10/10/10? What about getting everyone to log the SAME cache in one day. My suggestion: A one day only Locationless Cache. "WHAT!?" I hear people crying out in agony. Locationless Cache is the only cache type that would work in this instance, any other cache requires a specific spot, severely limiting your numbers.

Locationless Caches were "Grandfathered" (retired so to speak) several years ago for good reason. They don't really require you to go to a location. But this is exactly why a Locationless Cache would work in this case. The fact that they're Grandfathered is incentive for the thousands of cachers who don't have access to them!

I think that in light of how well 10/10/10 did, it proves that the Geocaching community can get the word out. I think it would take a tiny bit of work on Groundspeaks for this to succeed. Let's make this happen!