Meaningless Question of the Day (6/28/05)

[OpossumMember]

How do you do it?

I’ve talked with a bunch of geocachers, and an experienced team can find 30 caches in a day. How do you do that???

Seriously, or as serious as The Meaningless Question of the Day can be, let’s look at it.

6:00 AM – Get the kids out of bed.
6:15 – Eat
6:30 – Load the vehicle
6:45 – Drive to Cache #1
7:00 – Hunt for a place to park
7:15 – Head off for the common hide, a fallen tree or stump
7:45 – Back at the car

So, from 6:45 to 7:45 was an average hunt for me. Sometimes the drive to the next cache and parking are easy and it takes 15 minutes to get through town and unload, but the hunt could be much harder. I’ve gotten in and out in 15 minutes, once or twice maybe, but usually just walking to the cache and back takes 15 minutes, even for a tree stump. A multi could take an hour to hunt down.

So how do you do it? It takes me about an hour per cache. With kids you need to stop for potty breaks, lunch, the lost pen/pin/thing they actually forgot at home, whatever. That all takes time. Add in sun screen and bug spray applications, a game of “I poked you and you can’t catch me — tee hee hee hee!” and I can see maybe getting 8 in a full day, 10 if you hit a lot of stumps and the kids are good at it.

Plus, I have to get other things done. 5 hours of caching in any one day is a lot for me. I have to plan meals, buy food, cook, do laundry and cleaning, mow the grass, constantly fix stuff because everything I own is broken or doesn’t work right, answer e-mail, acknowledge I do have family members and a few friends, sleep, and sometimes even go to work so I can pay for all that. Oh, add utility bills, taxes, and other paperwork in there too, including get the mail.

So how do YOU do it? How do YOU score 50 finds on a good day?

[MajorBratMember]

First mistake…getting out of bed so late…LOL!!! When we plan a “power day” we are on the road by 5:30 or 6:00…the gpsr’s and PDA’s are loaded the night before. We have a general idea of which route to take (but that usually doesn’t matter once we start moving). The trunk is loaded the night before w/ anything that won’t spoil overnight. The bag w/ gpsr’s, pda’s, wallet, gum, candy, etc. is filled and sitting on the table. Shoes, clothes, hats are all in a pile on the couch. The alarm goes off and it’s game on! We spend about 30 min. on showers, dressing and grabbing last minutes…then off we go!
We try to take a mapsource or mapsend map w/ intended hunts on it, that way we can head for clumps of caches. Sometimes using a “nearest” on the gpsr doesn’t help because you end up going in circles. We run out a clump of hides then head for another clump. It helps having turn-by-turn on the gpsr! It’s usually my job to pick the cache, put it into the gpsr and then CB follows the gpsr to the hide.

Once the hide is uncovered, he signs us in while I’m searching for the next one. I do my go-to and get it ready, once back in the car I set his gpsr and we head down the road. (Meanwhile I bookmark the cache in the PDA for easier logging later).

Food and potty breaks are a must for us too! I refuse to drop trou in the woods…EEEEEUUUUUWWWWW! We carry snacks in the car to hold us over until time to break for lunch. Subs and/or salads are always a good thing to eat while caching. They fill us up w/ out weighing us down.

This past Saturday we picked up Genius Loci and Mrs. Genius at 6 am and headed for Bloomington, IL. We stopped a couple of times along the way for fast grabs. We went to an event that had 24 temp hides. While doing those we hit some permanents that were in the areas. Then grabbed some more on our way home. Our total for the day…48. All caches were in parks, but w/ the group we had…no problem! Not a bad day!

Then there are those days when we go out at 6 am and return home at 10 pm only to have picked up 4 or 5 finds. Some days we do 6, 7, 8 part multi’s…some days we do 3 miles walks per cache. It just depends on where we go and which cache we pick. We try to do all the caches in an area instead of only hunting the easy ones, or the park & grabs. If we don’t clean out an area, we go back another day.

I guess my point is that there is no right or wrong number of caches per day. It’s the situation, the people involved, the area and types of hides. There are lots of factors that make up what we do. Don’t give up or worry about what some other cachers are doing! Just keep plugging along, you’ll find a rhythm that works for your team. You’ll find that the more you use it, the better it will get! Before you know it, you’ll walk 50 caches in a day too! Just have fun!

Happy Caching!
MajorBrat

[Team HoneybunniesParticipant]

And on the other end of the technology spectrum… We have a pretty basic GPSr, a Garmin Geko 301 w/no mapping or other bells & whistles. Our best day so far is 26, and we didn’t really plan for a big # day.
First off, the disclaimer is that we don’t have kids, and we’re just enough granola that Ms. Honeybunny will go(ha!) in the woods so rest stops are usually for fluids and gas at most. We also tend to skip eating all day and go out for a big meal at the end of the day.
Pre-planning includes ordering the cache sheets(still not paperless, but looking forward to it)in a good driving pattern, and hand entering any new coordinates(gasp!). Packs are packed, yadda, yadda yadda…
All that being said, we don’t feel we’ve really planned our first power day yet. The area we had our big day in was one we had pecked at a couple other times, and we didn’t rule out long or difficult caches. Roughly 1/2 were park & log micros though.
I know it’s not about the numbers and all that. We didn’t count on the road, and we were lucky enough to find nearly everything. But at the end of the day it was really fun to see that big stack of sheets. I think we might have even giggled. And that’s fun too.

[Author]

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