Geocaching

I think this belongs here, as it's a "leisure" activity.

One of my friends and I decided to try geocaching. I am on my way out the door to meet up with her and another friend's kids, who she is babysitting today.

We've looked up a couple possibilities that aren't too far from the other friend's house and we're going to give it a shot.

I am not terribly woods-wise. Every time I go camping I have to have someone identify poison ivy for me, since I have no idea what that shit looks like (yes I know the rhyme, but it doesn't help since every damn plant out there has leaves of three). I have to assume I'm not very sensitive to it, because on more than one occasion I've had it pointed out to me that I'm sitting in the middle of a large patch of it. I also don't like bugs. Or snakes.

She has a miserable sense of direction, and has gotten lost despite having a GPS unit in her car. She's a retired Naval officer. Thank goodness in her day they didn't let women on ships. In OCS she plotted beautiful courses ... that always went the wrong way.

I should probably arrange for someone to be our safety call ...

We managed to find one!

Whoo hoo, happy dance, and all that.

May not have if we hadn't had bunnygirl (one of the babysitees) with us ... she spotted the cache, and earned a dollar bribe as well as one of the items in the cache. She took a bakugon, which is one of the latest cute Japanese fighting monster toys that she knows all about and I never heard of.

We tried for a second one, were probably within 10 feet of it, but we had to cut the searching short because a thunderstorm was coming in and we JUST made it back to the car in time!

We'll be going back again to find that one.

Oh, and my friend, Wrong Way Corrigan? She programs the coordinates into her GPS and says, "Okay, it says go this way. The arrow points this way!"

"Uh, wrongway?"

"Yes?"

"The arrow points north. You follow the black line. See that squiggle? That's that big road over there."

"But the black line goes straight through those trees."

"And the path right ahead of you curves around and back toward where you want to go."

Another time she wanted to climb up a 70 degree incline (okay, it was more like a big pile of dirt, but it was hill like) hill to follow the black line when once again, the path curved toward where we wanted to go.

Heaven help me.

On Thursday I am going to Ricketts Glen with this woman.

I expect that we will get lost in the woods and that I will have to roast and eat her to survive.

I already told her she has to mark the parking spot with that GPS thingy. Although, it should be pretty straightforward ... we go downhill to leave.



"Right.

:lol: you are big heap crazy. Leave a trail of crumbs.

I have a degree in Geography. I can only hope that they haven't run out of the little maps at the trailhead.

I found my Ricketts Glen Trail Map from two years ago. It's probably still good. Or at least good enough.

We have been rained out, so instead, we're going to make popcorn and watch movies and pick a new date.

Don't watch 127 Hours. ;)

(Actually, do...it's good!)

I found a geocache once, and I wasn't even looking for one!

I was just out wandering about and noticed a rock in a hollow between some tree roots, that looked like it could not have got there naturally. A little investigation revealed a plastic box with a notebook and some freaky trinkets in it. It was kind of a WTF moment!

Boo?

I'm liking the popcorn and movie idea.
Now, if only I could find you....
[COLOR="White"]Snaps to IM for Boo[/COLOR]

So, movie night was cool, we watched Sherlock, the first episode of The Jewel in the Crown, and Steel Magnolias.

Yesterday, I had a very serious illustration of exactly how bad her sense of direction is.

We were driving back to her house on a major road that had pretty heavy traffic. I told her that we could easily get around some of the worst of it by turning right and then taking a parallel road.

Easy enough, yes?

No.

We come to a T intersection and she says ... "I should turn right here, right?"

"Uh, no. That's back the way we came. Your house it to the left."

I think I forgot to mention that we were at this restaurant once, for lunch. She left to run and errand and came back for dessert.

Except that about 15 minutes after she left, my phone rang.

I didn't even say hello. I just went straight to, "How did you get lost?"

She has an in-dash GPS. She had marked the restaurant.

I must admit that it's impressive. She is directionally tone deaf.

I feel her pain. I'm the same way.

Fortunately there are segments of my home county where I can get people unlost simply by asking "what do you see out your car window." There are a couple towns where I'm better at it than others.

On the ground I'm pretty good at just figuring it out based on some spooky sixth sense sort of thing.

I just have to big myself up here.
I still have terrible trouble with left and right, but I can read a map like nobody's business.

And I have a pretty damned good sense of direction. Unless it's snowing - I shamed myself utterly in Glasgow, being internally sure we needed to go one way, whereas the other ladies were confident we had to go the other. And they were right.

Don't challenge me on the Tube though.
I was astonished that Mum (going to Cardiff via Victoria and the Leicester Square for Much Ado) checked every single decision I made. Hello?!
And yes, of course I was right.
But then we were on the Metropolitan/ Bakerloo/ Central/ Victoria tangle at the very heart of London. Add the Jubilee to that and it was pretty much my commuting home for a couple of years.

Take me with you next time, Wolf.
There's plenty of me to eat.
But I swear I will haunt you if you try to satay me.

There's coconut in satay, I think, so it's not likely.

I am allergic to coconut.

Not as far as I know.
Just teh evil peanuts.

I'd pretend to be allergic to them, but I can handle a handful of dry roasted.
And more than that of Ass Kickin Hot Peanuts!

I took mapreading in College and went on my first (and last) orienteering meet there.

I ended up going to the 'safety' area and walked back to the finish. I was late, but I would have won if I had completed my targets because almost noone completed the course.

Part of this was due to the fact that heat and humidity were excessive and I was one of the few people who brought a canteen.

I did get a few targets, but I was very frustrated by the one that I missed. Of course orienteering is compass and map, and with GPS things are much easier.

I do have a good sense of direction. Once I forgot my GPS and all my normal routes to work were closed or jammed. I used dead reckoning and made my way through the back roads. Once I relaxed and knew I would be late no matter what, I actually enjoyed the unfamiliar scenery. It was a clear morning and the sky was robins egg blue. At one point I was driving up a long 30 degree slope towards a section in a small valley. It looked like I was riding into the sky.

BTW, you are invited for BBQ when we get back from Vegas, I'll send you the coordinates.:D

Never used GPS, only Mr Beck's excellent map
Harry Beck designed the London Underground Map and it's bloody awesome x 100.

So being able to follow it without breaking stride isn't all that clever...

I blundered into an orienteering meet once, but since I was going to a different picnic (for which there was a location change and nobody told me), I didn't stay to check them out.

I know my way around a USGS quad, and was very disappointed to learn that the REI store doesn't sell them any more ... that was one of my favorite features of the store, and I was going to get the ones for Ricketts Glen, just in case.

wolf;751799 wrote:

I blundered into an orienteering meet once

I'm a bit too tired to write this punchline.

This one time, at bandcamp ...

As I've stated, I have a degree in Geography and Planning. There is actually only one viable Planning joke.

Since it's the dead of winter in Pennsylvania, which means 50 degree weather ... I've been out geocaching.

I like it better in the winter because the evil bugs are mostly asleep.

Although I was menaced by a spider today, trying to snag a trail map out of the container at the trailhead.

So, anyway, there's this geocache I was interested in, actually an earth cache. No container to find, just the spot and a geomorphologhy lesson.

I knew roughly where I was headed, but decided to go the long way around to the trailhead which was the first waypoint. Easily found the second waypoint marking the offshoot of the main trail that would take me down to the spot ... and ...

It was a fairly steep trail. I was fairly confident of my ability to get DOWN the train, completely uncertain about the UP part. I actually thought it over for about 15 minutes and decided that personal safety outweighed the amusement of being able to tell the 911 dispatcher EXACTLY where I was.

I'll go back, but I'll take a buddy.

Oh, and when I said the "long way around" I meant it.

From the parking lot the distance to the earthcache was supposed to be 0.8 miles.

Uh, yeah. As the crow flies.

Trudged my way along the path, and for quite a while my distance was decreasing and then ...

Yeah. Trail curved away from the destination point. How about that.

What does that mean, in practical terms?

Round trip 6.4 miles.

I continued around on the return trip, which was shorter than the to. I'll probably go that way when I do this again. Or pick a different parking area.

I'm curling up this evening with a nice bottle of Motrin.

outweighed the amusement of being able to tell the 911 dispatcher EXACTLY where I was.

this is funny!

Yeah. I had a good laugh over it as I was considering heading down that trail ... and I really mean down!

Where were you, Wolf?

ummm ... a park in an undisclosed location.

wolf;752214 wrote:

This one time, at bandcamp ...

As I've stated, I have a degree in Geography and Planning. There is actually only one viable Planning joke.

The one about running waste disposal through a recreation area?

Yep, that's the one.

Did a quick grab and go outside of the Evil Empire store today. A friend of mine had been unable to find it, not sure what her issue was.

Spexxvet;793743 wrote:

Where were you, Wolf?

the spot on the topo map where all the lines are crowded together. But on the high side.

Do you use a GPS, Wolf or do you go by dead reckoning? I love going out with my topo maps to some lost place and then seeing how precisely I can locate my position. I check my work against my GPS. Its great fun. I minored in geography myself.

wolf;752214 wrote:

This one time, at bandcamp ...

As I've stated, I have a degree in Geography and Planning. There is actually only one viable Planning joke.

Is it in here?

Actually no. There are apparently more planning jokes than I realized.

An architect, an electrical engineer, and a planner are having a discussion about God.

The architect says that by looking at the construction of the human body, the strength of the pelvis, the structure of the bones, and the intricate linkage of tendons to musculature proves that God is an architect.

The electrical engineer points out the way that the nervous system transmits electrical impulses throughout the body, proving that God is an electrical engineer.

The planner says no, gentlemen. Look at a woman. Who but a planner would locate waste disposal areas on either side of a recreational area?

guffaw.

Ran another errand, hit another cache, bringing me to a total of 10 caches, and 2 automotive-mounted travel bugs.

I mainly use the GPS, but if I do have a bit of extra time for planning, I will sometimes check the site maps for cache locations ... for example, the two I got yesterday and today I snagged based on the maps, but the ones that are a bit more off the beaten path, I get close and then rely on the GPS. There's a fellow locally who is part of the Delaware Valley Orienteering Association who doesn't use a GPS at all and has a ridiculously huge number of found caches (in the thousands). Groundspeak did a feature on him a couple of months ago.

Leap Day has some sort of mystical association for geocachers, so there were many events across the country to bring solitary, asocial people together to eat some lunch and talk some caching.

I went to one. It was fun. There was even an amusing ice-breaker game to get people who aren't usually given to talking to others to do so.

Afterwards, the friend I went with and I did some caching ... we found 5, mostly I was the finder, there was one that was part of a series she's doing, and they're all placed similarly, so she found that one straight off. Three out of the five I found were teensy-weensy magnetic nanocaches. I was quite proud of myself for those.

This brings my cache total to 20.

Yay, me.

There was a fellow at the event who has 16K+ caches found. I was appropriately amazed.

Double yay me ... it was pissing down rain the whole time, and I didn't whine, even when I had to slog through mushy ground and puddles. I may have to put my sneakers in the dryer.

I am now at home trying to get warm again. I've had one coffee already, not sure if I will stick with that or switch to hot cider.

Sounds like fun... even in the rain.
In the Oregon Willamette valley, it 's the default condition this time of year.

Today I was all ready to go caching. See, there's this cache that I've been referring to as my white whale. I've been after it multiple times (twice before today, including yesterday), and I really wanted to get this one, because there was a trackable item in the cache ... it's a harder cache, there are more attempted not founds than founds listed for it. Anyway, today I had arranged with a friend to meet in the parking lot near the cache site, and we were going to try together because I swear I looked at and turned over every stinking rock in the location, making sure they were really rocks. One of the issues is that the site is in a corner behind a shopping center and a lot of trash gets either dumped there or blows into that corner. It's nasty, to say the least.

So, I hop into the wolfmobile and ... you know that annoying clicky-clicky-clicky noise that non-functioning cars make? Yeah, that one.

Called my caching buddy, and let her know of my dilemma. She picked me up, we went caching, and she did the difficult and nasty climbing bits and ... I found the damn thing. Yay, me.

It was in a piece of debris that I had looked at every other time I was there.

After I got home I arranged for towing the car. I may not find out how it is or how much it will cost me until next week.

That's dedication... and success ! Yea-You


(Like a fish story, then next telling needs wind and rain and snow and...)

wolf;799107 wrote:

After I got home I arranged for towing the car. I may not find out how it is or how much it will cost me until next week.

Hopefully it's just a dead battery.

wtg wolf on landing your white whale!

too bad about your car though. sorry.

***
At a store the other day, I found a bin of tiny knick knacks called "message capsules". It looked like a little box of metal pills. They were, appropriately enough, capsule shaped. Each half had a knurled rim and when spun apart revealed two small caps like valve stem caps, but one male, one female. The center of the male end was hollow, and allowed enough space for a tightly rolled up slip of paper, about the size of a cookie fortune. They were $2.50 each.

wolf, have you seen these in any of your caches?

Something similar, but those seem to be just right for tying onto the legs of pigeons! Yes, they would work very well for geocaching.

What are called "nano" caches are pretty popular. They are about the size you describe, and are serious buggers to find because they are usually magnetic.

I've also seen a lot of containers around the size that you find at the pharmacy counter that are sized to hold bottles of nitro. Those are considered micros.

Got my car back today, and bless it's little heart, it was just the battery.

I'll be going caching with friends tomorrow early afternoon ... and hopefully there will be time for lunch. We're going to a great area for lunching.

BigV, I once had a special candle that, when burned down, revealed several little trinkets hidden in the wax, plus one of those pill capsules you describe with a little fortune inside.

I thought the capsule was cool, so I kept it. Several months later, my mom was snooping in my room and found it in my jewelry box. "And just what is this?" was her subtle conversation starter... :rolleyes: She got fairly embarassed after I explained and reminded her that she was the one who had given me the candle in the first place.

How do you geocache on a pigeon? Don't they fly around? Or would you have a battery operated GPS tracer in there too?

Pigeons home. You just have to catch them in the coop.

I just found my second geocache.

As with the first, I was just out hiking with a friend and we discovered it by chance.

Z, as an archeologist from the future, just how do you interpret these finds ?

Clear evidence that these people were nuts.