I myself went nuts trying to find a duplicate once and I wish someone would have told me if they had noticed but I also can see someone getting upset at being corrected. I think it is all in the “how and who” is telling you. I have not told anyone about a mistake except for a close friend or if someone mis-logged one of mine. Someone else’s numbers don’t matter much to me but if a gentle email to them would make their numbers more accurate, one way or another do you think it is appropriate to tell them? Not all owners care or notice the logs on their own caches and not all finders care or even know if their numbers are right I guess.

I know what to do if it is my cache but what if you notice it on someone elses’s? Would you want to be corrected?

TB1F65Q

As time has progressed, I’ve seen my share of geocoins out in the wild. I’ve also managed to collect my own fair share of them. I haven’t collected anywhere near as many as some have but between the coins given out for challenges, unique event coins, and other coins I have wanted to pick up, I’ve probably collected 20-30 so far. A small collection indeed but still something I would not have had otherwise had I not been into geocaching.

Geocoins come in many a different size and shape. The most common shape for a coin is the typical round type coin we have all seen. But outside of that, I’ve seen coins shaped like guitars, sharks, triangles, and a slough of other forms that inspire the imagination to wonder what made the designer come up with such a unique idea for a coin.

Some coins are better than others. Some coins are just downright butt ugly while others can almost take your breath away at how incredibly detailed they can be. I’ve seen some coins that incorporate three dimensional shapes and are quite large and upon looking at them, you’re not sure if it’s a coin, or some sort of archaic steam-punk key that powers a time machine made by HG Wells.

Whatever you may think, geocaching may have brought us to the outdoors, but it’s also brought out a bit of a collector in some of us. Many folks amass a huge collection of geocoins and that becomes their biggest focus. If they can’t have the coin themselves, they “discover” coins at events or out in the wild. Writing down trackable codes, snapping photos, or getting pages of coin codes so they can discover them and have them added to their list of coins they’ve seen. There are entire events that are purely about geocoins and sharing them, talking about them, trading, and even selling them. It’s almost an entire sub-hobby spun out of the geocaching genre.

Then we have the long debated topic of whether or not geocoins should be released into the wild. Much like endangered species in a zoo, many folks fear launching their coins out into actual caches for fears that the coin may go missing. Unfortunately, between coin thieves, and new cachers who don’t know what a trackable is and mistake it for swag, geocoins have been known to disappear once they enter a cache. They hop around for awhile but for many folks, they see their coins “stuck” in a cache only to find out that the coin really isn’t there at all because someone has taken it. This has lead to an entire business around proxy coins which allow the coin to be sent into the wild without the owner losing it.

For me, I continue to pick up event coins, and regional challenge coins from time to time. If I happen to see one I think is really cool, I might pick it up and add it to my collection. I don’t bother releasing them because for me, I want to keep the coin so I can enjoy the artwork and the unique aspect that is geocoins.

How about you? What kinds of cool coins have you seen? Do you have your own collection? Should coins stay put or move in the wild? What’s your opinion?

But after a dozen years of containers in the woods and many cachers who have come and gone, there is a lot of geojunk out there. Maybe we could list here the caches and series that either need maintenance, or should be removed altogether. Yes, we log Maintenance logs and Archive requests, but there is no public record of caches that we should just avoid. Case in point is the “Glow” caches that army.of.two wanted to do. I’m glad that this cache was talked about in the Chat window. Perfect, I now know to stay away from that one.

I for one, would like to know which caches and series to avoid. Also, I’m sure that some cache hiders would like a reminder of which hides need a little TLC (some couldn’t care less).  Maybe a little CICO (Cache In Cache out) is in order.

Don’t hold back, I feel that it’s time to do a good cleanup and free up some space.

We’re staying at an all-inclusive resort, which means everything is included; the room, all meals including room service, all drinks all day and night and all the entertainment and some water sports. Which is wonderful if all you want to do is eat, drink, sunbathe and drink and eat some more. The resort is beautiful, the beach and water are amazing, the food is great, the drinks are good and the service is excellent. But when you stay in an all-inclusive you see the Jamaica they want you to see and it sure isn’t the real Jamaica. All you see is the beach and the resort unless you take an excursion to one of the tourist attractions.

We got the name of a driver/guide from Moshera, a cacher from St. Stephen who had used his services a year ago, and made plans to have 2 days of caching while we were here. Boy, are we ever glad we did!

Phillip picked us up at 8:30 am for our first day of caching. Montego Bay, where we’re staying, is on the northern side of the island so we headed east, toward Ocho Rios and Dunn’s River Falls. If you’ve never driven on the left hand side of the road before, it is an experience! And in Jamaica they’re crazy. The highway we’re on is a divided 4-lane with a speed limit of 80 kph, which very few adhere to. Phillip is weaving in and out of traffic as buses, taxis and cars stop in the outside lane to pick up passengers. There are goats eating at the roads edge, with one occasionally venturing too far into the traffic. We speed by home after home made of cinder blocks, most just half completed with rebar poking high in the air, waiting for their second floors to be added. Phillip informs us that people build until they run out of money, then live there and add on as funds are available, adding metal sheeting or plywood to cover empty windows and doorways. Others are completed and painted every shade of the pastel rainbow. There are people everywhere along the highways; workers waiting for rides into town, vendors hawking their wares, old women tending fires, school children in their coloured uniforms, men gathering and talking in the shade.  It’s obvious that Jamaica is a very poor country, yet you don’t get a sense of hopelessness or defeat. People do what they need to do to survive and get on with life.

Dunn’s River Falls is one of the top tourist attractions in Jamaica and it’s not hard to see why. The falls are beautiful. They’re about 900 feet in height and you climb from the gorgeous beach at the bottom all the way up to the top. The water cascades down over numerous small steps and has many pools where you can swim or sit under the falls. Unfortunately, you are herded up the falls at a fairly quick pace so do not get to spend much time exploring or truly enjoying them, which is a shame. It also takes a bit of time to get used to the aggressiveness of the vendors here in Jamaica. In most places you are jumped on the second you enter and can be hounded until you buy or leave. It’s a bit disconcerting at first, but once you realize it’s their way of life and how they survive it’s a bit easier to deal with. The market at the top of the falls is notorious for this so we rushed through it, stating we had no money on us, which was true.  None the less, Dunn’s River Falls is definitely a must see (or do) when in Jamaica, doubly so since there is an amazing Earthcache GC18WG8 there.

After lunch, we headed back toward Montego Bay to see some sights and pick up the other 7 or 8 caches along the way. All of the caches in Jamaica have been hidden by folks who are visiting but they all have a local who will look after maintenance, etc. Many are in places that bring a little extra business their way so they are more than willing to be cache guardians. We stopped at a beautiful small private villa, Sea Rose Villa, for a cache GC3A2B and at a beautiful little beach near another cache, Over the Wall GC1P813 .

Jacob Taylor Beach is small and gorgeous but empty except for some local fishing boats and a few shacks where vendors sell their crafts. Phillip mentioned that the beach used to be very busy and popular, before the all-inclusive resorts were built. He, and everyone we spoke to, was very careful not to criticize the tourist industry because without it Jamaica would be devastated but it was now obvious to us that some of that industry also hurt the locals and their small businesses. It’s a catch 22 because these big international companies come in and build these palatial resorts that bring in thousands of visitors and employ thousands of Jamaicans but whose very existence keeps those visitors inside the resorts’ walls, not out spending money in the local economy. I guess it’s just like everywhere else; the rich get richer at the expense of the poor.

One of our favourite caches and probably the most unique we found was “RastaMon” GC2GQZ9 , a living carved tree at the entrance to a private villa, with the cache hidden in his “hair”. We finished the day off with a few more caches, most of them hidden at or near resorts that took us into Montego Bay and around the downtown area. We cringed at the people wandering in the middle of the busy four-lane streets selling newspapers, nuts, sugar cane and other stuff while cars zoomed by. It’s amazing we didn’t see any accidents but Phillip said they do happen regularly. I can see why.

Our final cache of the day was Mo Bay Cruisers GC3E27R near one of the ports the cruise ships dock at and we were FTF on it. How cool is that? We had read the cache page when we noticed a new one had been published a couple of weeks ago so knew to take a hanger with us as you definitely needed some help getting the container out. Our driver, Phillip, was determined that we would get the FTF once he knew what it meant. I think he was more excited about it than we were! A great way to end our first day of caching.

The 4 highest scores in the 2011-2012 Come Out & Play Contest were from WackyJack, team-newfie-trio, moshera and Ranger170. The 3 lowest scores were from Freedom Five, Coopsquared and geodimeter. LeBlancCoates won the prize for “Closest to Average” and K57 won the draw among those who finished with a “zero” score. Congratulations to all!

We’d like to offer a huge thank you to Zor and and his hampsters at Cache Up NB for, again, hosting us and creating the program(s) that enables us to use the site for registering, submitting claims,etc. It is soooo much appreciated!  We look forward to working with you to make it even easier next year!!

As part of my travels, I usually try and pick up a cache or two while I am on the road. I typically seek out virtuals and webcam caches as these are types that are very rare in our area. Given that these can no longer be listed, it’s interesting to be able to go to places that do have them and see what people have listed as virtual caches.

In a recent trip to London, I found an interesting trend. Instead of just having a typical virtual where you go somewhere and take a photo or send trivia answers, the virtuals actually had you going to multiple locations. With limited amount of time, I didn’t get a chance to do many of those but I did do a few. Of them, the one shown in the photo to the left here was probably one of my faves. This particular cache is located at the Royal Observatory and is where the prime meridian is located. The line you see in the photo divides the east from the west.

Geocaching takes us to many different places but it’s interesting to see how even caches that don’t have a physical container can still be quite something. Pretty much all of the virtuals I have been to have had either some historic or other significant purpose behind them and were definitely worth the trip.

Unfortunately, due to the abuse of virtuals, they can no longer be listed which is why I suspect they are so popular amongst cachers.

In NB alone, let alone all of Atlantic Canada, there are few virtuals to be found. I’ve done the Albert Mines cache and a few of the first post caches but outside of that, virtuals are few and far between. If you have the chance to snag these, it’s best to do them before they end up archived. Although they require no maintenance, virtuals have been known to get archived from time to time.

Have you been to any virtual caches? If so, which ones did you enjoy the most?

http://www.cacheupnb.com/category/anecdotes/pas-caching-tales/page/2/

This year we have been here nearly 2 weeks and I have not posted anything yet. I will try to add comments and photos to this poat later. Meanwhile here are a few tidbits.

* A lot of the caching here, especially the urban caching, is about deception, and camo. I doont know how much detail I can give because maybe i will try and copy the ideas.

* Two days ago we hiked for over 8 hours on trails in an Open Space preserve in the hills. We pikced up 28 caches and most were pretty tough. We have to admit to using hints for a lot of them and fortunately the hints were good.

* Why do you need hints for caches on a trail? Well there is no snow so they have a lot more hiding spots and are very creative. We see a pile of branches and we think the cache is under the pile. Well the cache turns out to be a nano imbedded in the end of a branch or twig. Or it is a dark green container in the crook of a tree under a pile of moss, or a magnetic nano at ground level at the base of a sign in the woods or a tiny fake rock.

* We had the thrill of seeing caches logged by Alamogul and even did an Alamogul cache. In case you didnt know Alamogul has nearly 65,000 finds.

More later

I also realize that I’ve done a couple of ridiculous things seeking out caches. When seeking out one of the waypoints on Zor’s “Jacob’s Bridge” Wherigo cache, I had to make my way to the island in Centennial Park. The bridge was gone at this point and it was the middle of summer, but paulie777 and I picked a day where the water levels were low. Still, I had to wade my way to the island through chest-deep water that was full of duck feces. The island was covered in droppings as well. While I waded to the island and back, paulie777 stood on shore taking photos with his iPhone and laughing his head off. When I got home, I had to strip off in the backyard and hose myself down, and soon after went to get a tetanus shot.

Over Easter weekend, I had another interesting experience. On my way home from Bangor, I stopped to get the very last cache in Maine before the border, “End of the Tour.” This cache is less than 200 m from the Maine-New Brunswick border near Houlton. You can actually see the border from the cache itself. And there is an airport visible less than 500 m south of the cache. I was heading back home late at night, trying to beat a snowstorm, and stopped to get the cache around midnight. After finding the cache, I decided to put my flashlight into the trunk of my car before going to cross the border. This is when the Houlton Police pulled up behind me. The officer had never heard of geocaching, and thought it was mighty suspicious that I would be on this dark road, that close to the border, at that hour of day, rifling around in my trunk. He asked to inspect the contents of my trunk, and there were a tense few minutes while he debated what to do with me. I think, in the end, he thought my explanation of geocaching was so preposterous that it had to be true.

Those are my ridiculous caching experiences. I can think of a few others – scouterscott breaking his ankle seeking out “‘Sara’sponda,” mousaka getting his car stuck on a backwoods road for almost 8 hours until a tow arrived, and TheNinjaJedi breaking through ice into a “frozen” lake when going for “Gilberts Cove.”

To what lengths and misadventures have you gone to get a cache?

Special Guests: TheNinjaJedi & Lexamazoo

News / Stories

• QR Challenges From GSP (Munzee Envy?)
• Delta Contest
• Magellan GPS Contest (Rev)
• COAP Contest Finale Details
• Jim52 Name Series to be retired

Recent Events & Caches

• St Patrick’s Day / Riverview Wing Event
• Breakfasts
• GC 301 / Chilli Nite / Puzzles & Pizza
• Ides of March
• Friendly Visitor (Zor’s LA Event) GC3DMV4
• New geocaches hidden by:
• EBE51, Insp Gadget, ajlong, Misha, Marocma
• Jack1129, Woody437, lilamam1 & bigdaddy, Greybeast, KentCountyKitty

This Month’s Topics

• Principles of Hiding
• Waiting for X Amount of Hides
• Good vs Bad Containers
• Good vs Bad Locations
• Other Tips
• Garmin VS Magellan
• The good, the bad, the ugly

As always, you can play/download it here or subscribe to us on iTunes. Hope you enjoy!

Audio credits go to Project 322.