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I know the weather has been pretty nasty, but our kids are still antsy, looking for their TB’s to move out. Our 3 caches are packed pretty full, and have been for a couple of weeks now.
Next week we’ll use GPS’ to lay out the base of the Great Pyramid on our school block, guaging height off the Menasha water tower behind the old Gilbert Paper Co mill. This activity really helps to visualize just how huge this pyramid really is. Awesome to consider these were built by hand thousands of years ago. But when I was over there in the 1970’s, the Italians had been hired to put some of the stone blocks back up that had rolled off – the 20th century Egyptians did not have the technology to fix their own pyramids…
Thanks a lot. cYa, Jim & the Seton CMS 6th graders
OK, here’s where we have around 25 school TB’s stashed for this weekend:
GC17508 in Waupaca near Hwy 10 / 22 / 54
GCRF7A 3 miles south of Waupaca just off Cty K
GC13EA5 near Hwy 10 & 76, just west of the Fox Valley
The kids missions are lofty, but they’ll be thrilled with initial TB movement and pictures posted. As these move out from Wisconsin, we’ll really get going with the other curricular areas – geography, statistics, math graphing, com arts letter writing, etc.
Sounds like a nice weekend to get out of the house and do some caching! We hope to.
cYa, Jim
Assuming I can do it on the way into work without getting soaked and muddy (or full of snow…), about ten TB’s oughta go into our Waupaca and ten into our Menasha Seton caches Tuesday morning.
The first batch disappeared out of the Waupaca cache pretty fast!
Thanks for the help. Let’s move ’em out before they get buried!
cYa, Jim
Well, network and schedule problems slowed us down a little… But the first ten of our student TB’s will land in our cache at the Waupaca Catholic Church ( GC13EA5 ) tomorrow shortly after noon. The other thirty-some will be moving out this week.
We’re not sure what’s going to happen to the other Seton cache over near the Valley. The business where it is located is suddenly without inventory due to its supplier going belly up. We are actively looking for a suitable place to move the cache to. Stay tuned…
Jim & all the SetonCachers teams
We were introduced to geocaching fairly early in the game at a youth camp we are involved with. We recognized it as an activity that would fit well with the camp, and in the process of learning how to teach it to kids, we got hooked.
Our camp nicknames are Grandma & Grandpa, started by a little girl when she was two years old. She was just on homecoming court, now a senior, so this has been going on for quite awhile. When we set up our gc account, it was with the intent to use it at camp, so we shortened our login a little to Gram&Gramps.
We have one adult son who is married, our adult daughter is still single. No biological grandkids yet. So the Grandma & Grandpa nicknames do raise some eyebrows every now and then, and just like many of the handles written about herein, require a bit of explaining.
Fun thread, this has been interesting.
cYa, Chris & Jim
We found a similar situation and reception at Arkansas state parks last spring. All 52 state parks have an “official” geocache, put out & registered & maintained by a local cacher, plus several more caches. Park staff seem to know where the caches are and were very friendly to us visitors. Each official cache holds a clue to an ultimate state park cache, which sounds pretty cool. We only need to find 47 more…
The WI state park naturalists have been encouraged by their Madison leader to do something similar. The WGA was represented again this year at the naturalists meeting in June, held at Hartman Creek S.P. Each of our state parks has access to a bunch of eTrex GPS units. They also have a standing offer of help from WGA members in every state park neighborhood who would be happy to help get things rolling – all they need to do is ask. The naturalists seemed to want to have a handle on placement due to environmental concerns, which I’m sure we’d all concur with.
Has WGA been contacted? Or any of us individually?
Here’s another avenue we can push a little, for our own benefit and the good ole State of Wisconsin.
cYa, Jim
Same with us. Even though we try to be interested in each others pursuits, there is not always a lot of common ground. In moderation, we enjoy caching together. I am probably more into it than Gram, but she is better at finding! But it has been good that we’ve found something we both can enjoy doing with one another.
We have logged finds on the same day far apart from one another, like in different states, but that has been rare. We do not see that as an issue as it happens only occasionally, it is not our standard practice. Most of our finds have been together, or me by myself.
cYa, Chris & Jim
We’ve done a lot of short and weeklong trips with our kids, and the children of our paddling partners. Some have been as young as 7. We use both canoes and kayaks. Our kids are now in their mid- to late-20’s. We’ve had a lot of days on the water.
Seldom have any of the kids been duffers in sitting in the middle of a canoe. We’ll typically put them in the front, but with the full understanding they we in the back will be providing most of the horsepower. Keys to making this work are appropriate expectations, shorter and lighter paddles, comfortable life jackets that properly fit, and regular stops and diversions – swims, snack breaks, frog hunting, etc. Poor weather can be a problem for kids, but if they are paddling they’ll stay warmer, occupied, and less whiny than if they are just sitting.
Kids like single kayaks, for awhile. The footrests usually will not pull back far enough for their short legs. Paddles often have shafts too large in diameter for their smaller hands. Rec kayaks, while stable and easy to get out of if there’s problems, aren’t sleek and some really plow through the water. Their width, and heighth with a light child in them, can present paddling challenges, requiring a longer (thus heavier) paddle in order to reach the water. And there is no partner to help out, and kayak paddler is mostly on their own. We usually use canoes for multi-day trips, and pull an empty kayak or two. They become more of a water toy, or for short fishing excursions.
We have towed a kayak with a tired kid in it with our canoe. The kid thought it was a neat ride, but it was pretty tough on us!
We own kayaks, and have used kayaks a lot with kids at our summer Adventure Camp. We like kayaks, but we know they are not always ideal for children.
We are not fans of tandem kayaks. Mostly heavy, boxy, hard to steer, etc.
Geocaching content: We’ve used both canoes and kayaks for water-based caches.
cYa, G&G – Chris & Jim
We had a pretty good fish dinner at Buettner’s Wild Wolf Inn recently. It is on Hwy. 55, about 5 miles or so south of Hwy. 64. The dining area overlooks a scenic section of the Wolf River, the prices are reasonable, and the fish lightly battered and not overcooked. Best fish we’ve found up north!
Chris & Jim
Every year, our new 6th graders send out a TB. They are packaged in a baggie, have an info printout enclosed, as well as a neon note identifying the TB as a student and school project.
The TB’s we released 2 years ago are about 50% AWOL. Many are in the hands of cachers who do not respond to numerous emails. These are not all rookies – quite a few are veteran cachers who own TB’s themselves. Some have gone missing as caches have been muggled – 3 from this group lasted 3 weeks and got zero miles. However, some have resurfaced after lengthy absences, so we can still hold out hope. And the 50% that are still moving have been all over the place.
The bunch from last fall have fared much better. It looks as though only around 17% are AWOL at this time. A summary of their travels, accurate through the end of May, can be seen by looking up our profile on gc.com – SetonCachers2
We’ll do it again this school year. It is such a terrific cross-curricular activity that pulls in skills from all areas. A new batch of our TB’s will be hitting our caches in late September and into October. Many of you regulars on these forums have been just fantastic in helping to get our kids’ TB’s out and moving, which we greatly appreciate. Your photo’s get color printed and go up on hallway bulletin boards. Your responses to our students’ emails also get printed out, and the kids love getting mail from somebody who had their TB.
I have to admit, I have a real hard time with people who do not respond to simple and polite emails about TB’s they’be been sitting on for months. Sometimes we hear back with explanations that make no sense, and sometimes with “I’m sorry’s” and the TB gets into a cache pretty quick. Our typical timeline is after 2 – 3 months, the cacher gets a note. After that it’s monthly. Eventually, if our emails have been repeatedly ignored, we post a Location Unknown with a pretty blunt note about what’s been going on.
We like TB’s, we’ll keep doing them, but with the full expectation that many of them are going to drop out of sight. BTW, our personal collection has about the same death rate…
cYa, Grandpa Jim
We’ve used ours on planes several times with no issues. We usually load a set of cache coordinates at our destination point, and then GOTO. We can watch the miles tick off very rapidly, track our progress on the maps views, etc.
For quite awhile, our GPS showed 633 miles per hour and 33,000 feet of elevation, but that record got overwritten for some reason. Too bad, it was kinda fun to show off how fast we geocache.
cYa, Chris & Jim
Becky –
It looks like I can commit to being a part of the June 10 presentation at Hartman Creek. Anybody else willing to jump in with resources, advice, caches, etc. will certainly be welcome!
Please share an overview of what was presented last year to avoid too much duplication. Thanks
Jim
Living in rural Waupaca County, being a cacher & hunter & camper & kayaker and veteran youth adventure camp leader, I’ve learned a lot about ticks. Some from online research, but also from seminars and through the Gunderson Lutheran Hospital Foundation, a leading Lyme and tick research center. I’m not a doctor, but I believe I’ve sorted the snake oil remedies from the best practices. Here’s some key points.
Good prevention, using techniques already shared, is best. Thorough and timely head-to-toe body checks are necessary, and can sometimes be sorta fun…
Wood ticks – larger, have whitish spot or little stripes on the back. No Lyme concerns. If embedded, grab and pull straight out with steady pressure. Don’t be concerned with leftover embedded mouthparts, they work their way out soon. Apple a dab of antiseptic and move on.
Deer ticks – smaller, reddish, with a dark dot on the back. If embedded, DO NOT just grab and pull, use one of the specialty devices or a fine tipped precision tweezers. Grab the tick as close to the skin as possible, and pull off with a slow steady pressure. Avoid squeezing the tick’s body as doing so may expel the bad stuff into the victim. Use antiseptic for a few days, and watch for a rash, which may be circular in a bullseye pattern. Not always, though, and not always at the bite site. Deer tick nymphs are tiny, the size and appearance of a freckle. They also embed, and also can carry Lyme germs, but can be very hard to find on oneself or others.
Concensus seems to be these techniques are the best, although many others swear by their favorite folk remedies. If interested, spend some time with Google and much more interesting tick trivia may be found.
I guess these are a nuisance of the outdoors. We can either stay cooped up inside and not do anything, or we can learn to deal with ticks in a smart manner, and stay healthy, and go out and have some fun.
cYa, Jim
I watched the film coverage of this incident on 2 of the Green Bay TV stations last evening. It showed 3 officers walking alongside the robot in regular uniforms, not bomb suits. The suggestion of the newscast was the robot was carrying the suspected bomb. However, perhaps they were just walking the robot up to the “bomb”, not carrying it off.
The thought did cross my mind that if they were really worried about a bomb they might have been using different procedures and protective gear…
Grandpa Jim
We plan our vacations, and then plan our caches. We typically don’t do a lot of them when traveling, but I’m always thinking about routes which may offer an opportunity for a new county in WI, or a new state. And we usually manage to find a few.
A couple of years ago, we rented a beater Toyota Corolla in Aruba and cached our way around the island. Just about every place we pulled in to also had a few of the expensive tour buses from the cruise ships. We saw all the sights we wanted to see, found a few caches, and spent less than $50.00 for a full day outing (about 1/3 of an official excursion from Royal Caribbean). We stayed alert, being in a foreign land, but never felt uncomfortable. But the caches we chose were around the popular tourist spots (for the most part…)
cYa, Jim & Chris
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