DeLorme personality type?

[Trekkin and Birdin]

As I sit here kind of grounded due to various circumstances, I find myself with wandering thoughts. We’d thought we’d have finished the MN DeLorme by now, yet we haven’t added a single new page since last fall, almost a year now. Granted, they’re the pages furthest from home and we don’t have occasion to go there otherwise. Still……..I know people who can zip through a challenge like that in a weekend. We look at all that unexplored country and think….why would we want to drive the main roads and get a few on each page, missing out on stuff we’d love to see and do?

So…..is there a personality type for completing this kind of challenge? I know whatever it is, THB has it. LOL I’m thinking that we may never get this done, or if we do, it might be years down the road as we manage to get a couple pages here, a couple pages there.

Maybe I’m being too analytical…who knows? Just a game! 🙄

[Smashing Ground]

I just got 10 new counties in wisconsin but selected only specific caches like Virtuals,Waterfalls,WSQ’s (since they tell the history of the area),Tb hotels,and ones with high number of favorite points. A trip is something you want to remember, not something that seems strenuously boring.
So give your trip a Favorite Point/ not a cut and Paste Log.
Remember “There Are No Straight Lines In Nature Or In Life”
http://www.dailyom.com/articles/2005/393.html

[Trekkin and Birdin]

That’s how we always make our caching choices…looking for certain things and making a bookmark of those, plus a few extras close to any of them. I don’t know when the last time I did a blanket PQ of an area or route. For us, a big PQ for a 2-3 day trip is 50 caches, of which we’re happy to get half when all is said and done.

I guess it’s still the journey for us, and if that means we’re 93 when we finally finish the MN DeLorme, so be it. We seem to keep going back to certain places, whether we “need” those pages or not….North Shore, the Cannon River valley, the St. Croix/Interstate area. We’ve had some significant life changes we weren’t expecting that have really affected our ability to do many multi-day trips, but even before that….I guess we just don’t have the “itch” to complete, LOL.

[RSplash40]

Are you thinking type a or type b personality? Is there a type C – Crazy Cacher?

[huffinpuffin2]

or ESTJ v. INFP v. TFTC? 🙂 🙂

[Team Deejay]

In the past, when we did Delorme runs, we always tried to be “efficient”, grabbing caches as close to the corners of the pages as possible. That was ok, but we did find a lot of guardrails, road signs, and other boring hides. Our last trip to the Eau Claire area, however, was different. After getting a PQ of the area, we selected the caches with the highest favorite rating on each page (and county) and ended up with a list of 16 caches to grab. While not all of them were amazing, some were really great and the others were at least “average”. The only problem was that did manage to find every permutation of bird house hide on our journey! On our way back home, we did a similar thing, running a “caches along a route” query and picking the 12 most favorited caches. Again, we found 2 or 3 awesome caches (and another birdhouse), and really enjoyed the run. I’ve now made up my mind that we will use this same technique for caching around home. It definitely increases the fun factor when finding.

[Trekkin and Birdin]

When we almost quit caching a year ago, we took about a month break and thought about the things that appealed to us….hikes, discovery, challenging terrain and the like. We adjusted to picking and choosing and have been much happier this way. We have lately been getting easier stuff close to home and along the way the past couple weeks, but we won’t ever go back to “needing to get it all.” It can’t be done, anyway.

I’m still struggling with going to a completely new area, like northwestern MN and then being “efficient.” The excessive use of fossil fuel is starting to concern me, too. That’s another topic, however, but does play into all this.

[LMcGisme]

Usually I use a DeLorme or other challenge as an excuse to go somewhere I haven’t been to or seldom visit. Once there I’ll be sure to grab a cache or two, but I spend more time exploring the area – hiking or visiting museums and such than I do actually caching. I’ve always been more of a traveler that cacher, though I do like to see the map get colored in with different countries/states/counties that I’ve visited.

[Team Honeybunnies]

Heh, heh,

Yeah, we’ve done a few DeLormes… It’s interesting to hear the point of view that you’ll be missing so much by passing through. I like to think that when it comes to the DeLorme we are among some of the more enlightened finders of multiples, as rather than splitting down grid lines, going to quad corners and doing the nearest cache in each corner, and completing these whole challenges in one spurt, we have tended to complete them over multiple trips, multiple years, doing the good stuff and combining them with vacations that have been among some of the best in our lives.

Rather than worrying about what we might have missed while passing through, we’ve instead reveled in all the amazing things that we have experienced. For me the joy of life is in discovering new things and places, and even the most astonishing sights and sites are to be replaced with a new experience in time.

I know fully well that life is finite, and many roads will never be traveled again, though some will, and I find myself surprised to occasionally visit places we never again expected to be. We took a trip down the Mississippi River this weekend and ended up in Nauvoo, IL, burial site of Joseph Smith, prophet of the Mormon Church. I had visited there with Zuma while working on the Illinois DeLorme, and never reasonably expected to set foot there again. But life does surprise.

If you find yourself wanting to pursue a challenge, chase it with all the zeal you can muster. You won’t regret the memories of the experience. And if life brings you back to some of the more amazing places, the memories of those previous visits will surely be savored.

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