Michael Alexander – Not So Lost Puppies

[NSLP1]

Hello everyone. I was notified that I had been nominated for a position on the WGA BOD last week. Wow… It is an honor just being nominated. Thanks to whomever put my name into the hat 🙂

Ok, so about me…
I’m almost 40, married, live in Mount Horeb. I’ve lived in Wisconsin, and the Madison area most of my life. Growing up, I frequented many of the State Parks and waterways with my grandfather. I’m a Network Administrator at Milwaukee Valve in Prairie du sac. Other hobbies include woodworking, going to renaissance fairs. We own two Hybrid cars, an Insight and Civic Hybrid, the civic is our primary cache vehicle, though sometimes we take our van to give Midnight more space, or if we are camping.

I started geocaching with my wife Candi and our pup Midnight the summer of 2005. I bought a GPSr to use for boating, a Meridian Gold (with DirectRoute, and a Lakes card), and around the same time had found some information online about Geocaching. I signed up on Geocaching.com, looked to see what was around home and work, saw there were afew of them in town where I work. Went out looking for one of them… lots of other people around, I didn’t feel comfortable looking very hard for that one, then went out looking for another one. Boy did I take the long way for that one! But I found it!! That cache was “The Lost Armadillo” in Sauk Prairie (Sauk City/Prairie du sac, I’m not sure exactly which it is officially in). I talked about it with Candi, she wasn’t sure about the whole idea.

I found information about paperless caching, I had a Palm m500 that I hadn’t been using alot. played around with various programs with it. One of the first programs I found was GSAK, and then plucker (have since moved to using CacheMate) and started loading in various caches into my PDA and GPSr just in case.

We frequent the Prairie Moraine dog park alot, and I saw there was one in there. We usually go with afew others and their dogs, but this time (almost 2 months after my first find) it was just us so we went looking. Being new to this, it took us awhile to find it, and I needed to use the hint, but we found it as well. She now understood abit more about the game/sport/hobby/obsession, but still wasn’t too interested. Almost another month later, we went camping near Lena, IL with some friends. I loaded up some of the caches for the area in GSAK and Plucker. Didn’t do any caching while we camped. On our way home we watched on the GPSr to see if any caches were nearby, just across the state line in WI there was one less than 1mile off the road, Midnight would enjoy getting out of the van, so we stopped. The cache was “Collectors Cache” (now archived) and this time Candi was now hooked on geocaching. 🙂

We are not into the numbers, we cache when we want to. Frequently we cache during our travels. In fact when we reached our 50th cache, over half of them were out of state. We have done some days were we do alot of caches, though we usually just do afew here and there. I have managed afew First To Finds along the way. Our primary enjoyment of geocaching is getting out to visit places we didn’t really know about. There are so many parks and recreation areas out in the world that are not very well marked, or that we feel too busy to stop and see them. Geocaching gives us more of a reason to go visit those places. We haven’t found alot of caches (not yet to 200) but we have cached in 9 states.

I know there are some that are out to find x number of a caches a year/month/day whatever, but we are not that type of cacher. Though we do go through some spurts like that, particularly for the cache quests put on by “the caching place.” We have helped with the Cub scouts winter jamborie in Verona last year, and would help again this year (I have the pictures we were given last year from it to give to the WGA yet.) We have attended afew events around the state, even travelled to Eau Claire to meet on of the first Coin Quest requirements, we met alot of nice people there, and even went along on the hunt for “Jesus’ Tomb”, wow! that was quite the cache!! I don’t think we ever would have attempted that on our own. We also completed several other of the quest requirements that day, and found our 100th cache that evening:”Old King” by Zuma, a very appropriate #100 for us, it was at the Eau Claire dog park. 🙂 We’ve also found a Hotdogs Off Trail cache nearly 500 miles from home! Midnight wears a TB tag, and we log her cache visits, and others that meet her are welcome to log a “find” 🙂

I have hosted afew Paperless Geocaching training sessions, primarily using GSAK and CacheMate. I’m glad to assist anyone who has some questions on the subject as well. We are working on putting together some documents and how-to’s on the subject as well.

I’m gotten in the geocoin craze, though I don’t feel the need to have them all. I primarily like the organization sponsored coins and personal coins. I designed the World Travel coin (animated icon) and then made our own (non-trackable) which we leave in caches and trade (not sold)

I support the WGA and its efforts to promote responsible geocaching in the state. While I don’t have any caches in Madison, I’m glad that they worked with the appropriate officials to get caches allowed in city parks. I’m glad the WGA has worked with the WI DNR to allow caches on state lands, though I do think some of the SNA issues could be revisited. I do have afew caches in the Dane County Parks system through their permit system. And because of those efforts, have received approval to place caches in our local Mount Horeb parks. I’m happy to see that we have begun a cache rescue program as well. I think we should also work with law enforcement to educate them on geocaching to help avoid more of the bomb scare events that have been increasing as Geocaching becomes more popular.
I would also like to see another WGA geocoin produced. Maybe even have a common coin die made that other WGA members could use when making their own coin which could save them some $$.

Once again, I am honored to have been nominated for a position on the board.

-Mike
Not So Lost Puppies
Our GC profile

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