What was different then? What have we learned since?

[sandlanders]

Today is our “geo-versary”.
We found our first cache on October 17, 2007.
Yes, our GC date is September 1, but it took a lot of lurking and getting a receiver before we went out on a hunt.

What was different?

No signpost caches.
No smart phones.
No social media.
Gas was cheaper.
Four finds was a big day for us.
Didn’t know a GC soul.
Didn’t know what a nano looked like.
We were amazed by guardrail and skirt lifter hides.
There were lots of close caches we hadn’t found… ammo cans and plastic containers… in the woods.

What have we learned?

There is a shortage of film but not film canisters
New words and abbreviations, like “geobeacon” and “FTF” and the dreaded “TFTC”.
It is just as fun to hide caches as it is to find caches.
Paperless is much easier.
12-15 caches is about all we can enjoyably handle in one day.
We are inefficient cachers.
We write lengthy logs and lengthy cache pages.
We have a ton of photos in our profile gallery.
We don’t care for wet feet, swamps, cold, or steep climbs.
Ticks suck. Big time. Especially in May and June.
Trekking poles are usually necessary.
We can do higher terrain levels than we think we can… but we don’t always go for them.
Geocaching has its ups and downs.
Geocachers like to eat and talk a lot.
It’s never about the numbers.
There are as many kinds of geocachers as there are people.
There are many wonderful places in Wisconsin to visit… and geocaching will take us to most of them.

Yeah, we think we’ll stick with this activity.

[labrat_wr]

Very nice reflection Pat. Glad you plan to stick around. Happy Geoversary!

Disclaimer : Always answering to a higher power.

[Chatauqua560]

Happy Geoversary! TFTC

[JimandLinda]

Happy day, kids!

[BigJim]

Happy Geoversary! I remember my first lamppost cache. I was stumped! It took three trips to Wisconsin Rapids before I figured out where it was. I was so impressed I went back to Marshfield and placed one. I’m glad there are still places where I can put an ammo can out in the woods.

All opinions, comments, and useless drivel I post are mine alone and do not reflect the opinions of the WGA BOD.

[sandlanders]

@BigJim60 wrote:

Happy Geoversary! I remember my first lamppost cache. I was stumped!.

Yes! There are no hiding spots in the middle of a parking lot… are there? And at our first dead end guardrail cache, we were scouring the nearby bushes and grass clumps until we thought to stick our hands inside the metal! :LOL:

[Grandma & Grandpa]

Congrats, Mark & Pat. We are looking forward to celebrating our geoversary with you two next month. And we’ll save the ‘then and now’ post, as we can make the same claims! cYa, Chris & Jim

[sandlanders]

@Gram and Gramps wrote:

We are looking forward to celebrating our geoversary with you two next month.

:like:
Always like hearing other people’s caching experiences, particularly from “way back when”.

[Trekkin and Birdin]

Congratulations you two!

We’ve been at this just a little over a year longer than you have, so our reflections are similar. We do like climbing, swamping and all that fun stuff and the hiking staff is (usually) left behind as it just gets in the way. We remember that the caches were for the most part at least the size of a small tupperware container, people actually wrote a note along with their name and date in the logbook, and there might have been as many as two caches in a three mile hike. One was enough, as the places we went were worth the time to enjoy and explore in and of themselves.

Oddly, though we’ve sure done more than our share of nanos, guardrails, dead ends and series of finds, the ones like I mentioned were the norm “back in the day” continue to be our favorite type of hide to seek. The changes in the hobby do serve to make it more accessible to more people of all types of ability, so that isn’t a bad thing at all. When we long for the “good old days,” we just remind ourselves of that fact.

[Walkingadventure]

Great reflections Pat. Happy Geo-anniversary

Following the signals from space.

[sandlanders]

@Trekkin and Birdin wrote:

… people actually wrote a note along with their name and date in the logbook …

We still try to do that when the log book is large enough. Usually those caches don’t get visited very often, so we don’t feel guilty taking up half a page or more.

And remember when writing what you traded was a big thing? I like to read previous online logs on caches before I write our own log, and for the older caches where the logs go way back, it was not uncommon to see, “Took (whatever), left (whatever).” That was still going on a bit in late 2007, but the proliferation of micros cuts back on both the swag aspect and the lengthy log book log.

[Trekkin and Birdin]

We will write a note in logbooks that can handle it as well. With Poohs Pal joining us and trading, we’ll let him share what he traded for what in his logs. Actually, he just makes up stuff when I ask him how to log, except for the “we found it!” part.

So I still have to ghost write the majority of his stuff. 🙄

[Hitman4]

Happy Geoversary.

We still laugh about the first magnetic keyholder we found. We thought that was the best container ever. So impressed. 😆

[Lostby7]

We are 9 years on Halloween (first cache Sunday, 31 October 2004). I have the same observations as you but I’ll add one more:

100 caches was a big year not a big day.

[Lostby7]

@BigJim60 wrote:

Happy Geoversary! I remember my first lamppost cache. I was stumped! It took three trips to Wisconsin Rapids before I figured out where it was. I was so impressed I went back to Marshfield and placed one.

I saw my first one in New Jersey…I thought it was brilliant….ya not so much anymore.

[Author]

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