Our caching day- Indoors

When you first start caching, you think mostly about inputing coords into your GPS and going out to find some caches. Before long you realize that caching is a lot more than that.  Ma and I have been hikers for many many years so geocaching was a good fit for us. But little did we realize all the side benefits and the fun. 

Over the next little while I am hoping to post a number of articles that I hope will tell you all about the wonders of geocaching and how it has literally changed our lives.  I will tell you about the friendships, the camaraderie, the socializating and the events.  I will tell  the funny stories, the  funny logs, the adventures and the misadventures.  I will tell you how much we have learned, like html, GSAK, Maps, hardware and software, etc.

And I hope you will respond and tell everyone your stories.

Now back to the title “Our Caching day -Indoors”. I want to describe our day today as an example of what I was mentioning above.

Today was a snowy rainy windy day so we decided to stay inside.  We ended up spending a lot of time at the computers.  I can get very verbose, so I will try and do a lot of this in point form.

*I finally logged the TB’s we got at Sunday’s breakfast event. I indicated that we would be bringing them to Quebec in April unless the owners wanted them to move quicker.

*Ma had read on this site (milosheart) that there are likely to be 3 or 4 events in fredericton on April 10 weekend, so she spent some time looking at caching maps of the area. She also did some work with Pocket Queries and GSAK identifying series and eliminating caches with too many DNF’s . We will likely be going a day or two before to do a little caching. We will stay till Monday morning but we will not be coming home.

*We will head for Sherbrooke when we leave Fredericton. Taz30 from Riviere du Loup were at the Ice Walk and told us about an event on April 17 to celebrate Opus terra’s 15000th cache.  Ma did some work involving PQ’s for Sherbrooke and examining the caches in the area. She discovered that there are 468 caches wthin 6 kms of Beckett Park in Sherbrooke.  Ma planned a number of days of caching in the area.  We are looking into trails and parks in order to get lots of exercise.

*We then examined the route from Quebec City to Sherbrooke via Plessisville and Victoriaville. We had done lots of caching in the past on the system of bike trails in the area. The maps showed us that there are tons of new caches on the trails. So we are planning to take a few days to get to Sherbrooke.

*Even though Sherbrooke is getting us close to family in Ottawa, Ma had decided that we should come home after the Sherbrooke event.  But today she discovered two events in Montreal area (April 20 & 22) during the week following Sherbrooke. More Pocket Queries and maps, etc.

*Well Montreal is even closer to Ottawa. I wonder if we should go drop in on Jake & Ben (our grandkids). Hey look at that :OMAX2 is on in Gatineau on May1 and there is an Oregon 550 to be won. We went to the first OMAX last year and had a great time.  OK more looking at caches, PQ, etc.   I  began thinking of a chance to add more Micro Logics to the three I have in Gatineau. 

*The above took quite a bit of time and involved quite a bit of discusssion, surfing, map reading, etc. But that wasnt the only geocaching stuff occupying our day.

*In mid June we will be hiking for a week on the appalachian trail in Virginia with a group. MA and I will be driving there from Ottawa on I 81  so we began looking at making a pocket query along a route to keep us occupied during the drive. We have a caching/hiking friend in the area so we have some caching to look at there.

*We exchanged emails with cachers about some of our caches and also looked into doing some local caches and series maybe this week with some local caching friends.  Dragoon contacted us offering to help regarding problems we had with our two MGA puzzle caches.  We had archived the two puzzles because it was difficult to get the info from MGA to solve the puzzles. I thanked him for the offer but the caches have now been replaced with traditional caches

*Tomorrow we head to the Shediac area to do some maintenace on some problem caches. We made our plans and prepared our supplies.

*Three new caches of ours came out today. We checked them again, with special attention to the puzzle cache. We checked the stats for the three puzzles of ours that came out last week. The geochecker allows us to see the success people are having solving the puzzles.

*With cooperation from Team BikeFast, we have a Micro Logic Puzzle coming out in the Saint John area. I spent time finalizing the puzzle calculations ensuring the answer was unique, and preparing the cache page. There was an exchange of emails with BikeFast in that regard and we used Google Street View to see the cache location.

*Ma spent part of the day working on puzzles in some of the areas we will be caching in the next few months.

*We then discovered that the Nova Scotia Spring kick-off is on March 27. We have been to at least the last two. There is a massive fun crowd at that event and the food is incredible at Curly’s. They will have a coin for the event. We will have to order at least one. MA did more PQ’s and worked with GSAK for caches in the area and in Truro, and made plans to get our few remaining caches in Amherst. We checked with caching friends to see if they wanted to go again this year.

Well that is all I can think of at this time.

I will try and make the next ones shorter