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I’ve seen several theme caches that have survived for as long as I’ve been caching, and we have one ourselves, in fact our first cache. I also do carry a couple matchbox cars with me at all times.
It helps over time to temper your expectations. I’ve invested some time and more than a few bucks in keeping my caches fun to find for both kids and their parents. That’s one of my own personal joys, and my whole family shares in the satisfaction of seeing logs reflecting the appreciation of finders on behalf of their kids or themselves. We all remember those unexpected extra comments or e-mails from someone who’s visit to a cache (not always even ours) was made special by something they found there. That’s why I do carry a swag bag with some things we have found appreciated by cachers and their young partners.
But, it comes with the turf to have to trade out broken or tattered swag to make or keep a cache special, if that’s what makes you tick. Some things I take out and file in the circular at the park or take home for a few laughs with my wife and son before finding some other use for the “trade” item. Some don’t care one way or another what they find in a cache, the find is all that matters. Others give up on regular sized caches when they repeatedly become filled with sad looking stuff. It’s inevitable that there will be a variety of surprises when you make a find and open a cache bigger than one holding only a log. That can be fun or funny in it’s own way. I guess the important thing is, if you find something good about the hide or the contents, that your log reflect your approval in some way, so those who go the extra mile get your encouragement.
Hmmmm.. I guess congrats are in order, in spite of your post on Rocky telling me to check the lonely cache scoreboard. Can’t a guy open his e-mail without getting drawn into another map search? Way to go on the milestone, glad you have overcome your snow allergy, and good luck on the lonely cache race. You might get used to hearing footsteps behind you up there! Congrats, again, big guy!
BIG congrats to you both. Love your cache selection and hope to see you over in our neck of the woods soon. You haven’t slowed down in spite of the terrain! Congrats, again!!
Way to go! Now that we have met twice at meet and greets, it’s time to see you knock down a few nearby and get to see you on the trail! We’ve got another thirty or so waiting for you here. That millennium is closing in! Congrats, again!
That Dave name covers a lot of territory. Go for August Marc, I’m on vacation. Then again, there is one lonely cache up on Rock Island. Good chance it might be found by then. I echo the thanks to Robin and Jeremy for the donations. I also expect we will see a new monthly winner starting this month.
Regarding the summary, does anyone have a reading on addition of fire tacks to live trees for placement of night caches? Also, would it be acceptable to drill holes in down and dead trees or branches for insertion of a nano or micro waypoint or final?
This past weekend, and to some extent, the weekend before, saw people who hadn’t been out all winter, and in some cases for nearly a year, out visiting some of my caches. Some new caches, some old, but, yes, out in droves getting out to new and old interesting places. Is great to see all the new logs!
I’ve asked the same question myself, and at first only reported these as DNFs, though all I really wanted was to log the find in the first place. When I saw others claim these as a find and report them in the game as such, including one of the responders above, I decided that was the way to go with the find and the game.
I can live with doing it either way, though I would like to go back someday and find those missing caches, whoever replaces it, the owner or someone else. If some consensus is arrived at that specifies one was or the other, I can live with that, retroactive in the game or from when decided forward.
Thanks, everyone, for the encouraging comments in both months announcements on the Lonely Cache Game! I have been negligent in keeping up on this forum category and hadn’t even seen these till I got a tip from labrat_wr yesterday. Too much field work finding and doing maintenance on caches, including some spring house cleaning on some of my own. Address is Dave Lovejoy, sometimes at 838 West Airport Road, Menasha, WI, 54952. I am accepting fuel donations on maintenance runs, or even gasoline discount coupons. Those can go in my caches and I will swap jeeps or other trackables in for them. It’s been great fun for these past two months seeing caches in quite a number of towns and cities I hadn’t yet visited. For March, I’m still in the game, but expect some new contenders will emerge and we’ll have a different winner. I hope everyone playing has as much fun as I have had, and get to see some good caches and some great places.
I’m pretty much with zuma! on this one. With work and a family, life is too short to spend it all at the computer when I would really rather be outside, summer or winter, trekkin’ around seeing interesting places and finding caches, usually not at guard rails at dead ends. I run into those enough trying to find interesting and challenging caches without a navigator.
I have, however, done as many puzzles as zuma!, a result of where I live, and what opportunities present themselves for FTFs, lonely caches, and, of course, many good and interesting puzzles by several of my friends that are relatively solvable (sometimes with help), and do challenge and educate, inspire, or entertain. This is not always the case, however, and some, unknowingly till you spend several hours getting frustrated looking out the window at the sunny landscape and praying for coordinates, don’t reveal their difficulty till you’ve made more of a commitment to solving it than you would do had you not known what you were getting into at the start. Maybe an hours, or days, to solve the puzzle rating system would help those of us slow on the draw, but fleet of foot.
It’s not so much that I dislike puzzles, that I would rather be out on the trail caching. Any day. I think much of what I can learn or appreciate in most good puzzles could be condensed a bit to make it more fun. Some puzzles, like others suggest, are simply overboard and obtuse to the point of exasperation. Hence, Sagasu’s Sinister Semantic Search, a comment on challenges way beyond reason. Please do not try it until the additional hints make it more palatable, unless you are driven by such things. It appears even seldom|seen, Marc, and perhaps even gibonacci have surveyed the water and are wisely taking a wait and see stance for now.
I’ve done enough puzzles to have made a commitment to traditionals that inspire or delight, and sometimes even challenge. Multis are o.k. if they are not too long, have missing waypoints, or seem like puzzles after you get back into the car to drive around town for a whole series of waypoints, often driving past easier caches that would be more fun. Sometimes I just do them on the way. It’s a matter of preference, ultimately, and what you choose for a challenge. I used to feel obligated to do all the puzzles on my closest to home list, but now many of them have to go on the back burner for a rainy day, or when inspiration hits.
Some very interesting comments and questions have been shared here on the idea of a uniform designation for so-called kid-friendly caches, more than I considered when I placed six new traditional caches in the greater Menasha/Appleton area this past week and did so with both kids and adults in mind. The singular thrust of my effort was to provide some new caches that were traditionals and not puzzles, though my fifteen year old son does enjoy and like some puzzles and was an equal partner in creating our most difficult cache, a 5/5 puzzle that still has not been solved or found.
What I had in mind was to offer some new caches that would not take a lot of time to solve or find, be easy enough to get to without a long trek, though a few of them had some fun medium-terrain challenges, and that I could comfortably add the kid-friendly attribute so many of the cachers who I know in the area could seek them and take their kids to enjoy the chase together. I also included something entertaining about each of these caches, either the location, the design (like the two pocket caches) or the contents, most of them having swag that has been treasured by kids, and their parents, like my favorite blue light-sticks, golden dollar coins for the first kid-to-find, new and recent commemorative state quarters (which at least a couple kids were thrilled to claim to fill a spot in their quarter books), new plastic animals, miniature kaleidoscopes, and other items that I carry in my swag bag that have had positive feedback on over time, both from kids and their parents. Not to leave the folks out, there were also several jeep travel bugs that seem to have been eaten alive already by the equally eager parents and other cachers.
It didn’t take a lot of time to put these together, and just a bit more to find decent locations, but the reward for me was definitely the logs of the finders and their reports on the fun they and their kids had with the new caches.
On a more practical note, I use the kid-friendly attribute when it seems like a cache might be interesting to some kids, not all, as they are each different and may get some enjoyment out of different things. I try to maintain caches that take people to interesting places, are fun to find in some way by what the container is or where it is placed, and have something inside that may interest kids or their parents, whether cool swag or neat trackables. I also try to check up on the health of my caches as often as I can to remove unwanted kid’s meal toys (my pet peeve), and other tattered or broken swag. If the cache contents have something to do with it being friendly, and it hasn’t been treated in a friendly way, I try to fix it so the cache remains worth finding.
For me, that is at the heart of the issue, not some uniform criteria or designation at the time a cache is placed, but how finders and the owner treat a cache to keep it fun to find. Unfortunately, that sometimes takes more work than the design, the good swag or trackables put in at start-up, and the time to find a good spot to make the hide. Caches other than those intended to be only a log for claiming a find, sometimes on a difficult puzzle for which the reward is mostly succeeding at solving it and being able to find and sign that log, need to be kept fun by the finders, or, if not, by the owner.
It’s sometimes disappointing to see caches plundered by finders who take the good stuff and leave a less finder-friendly cache, whether for kids or adults, or to replace or move a cache that was muggled due to lack of discretion with regard to stealth or failure to leave a cache as well concealed as found, as if all that counts is making that find. But, since I love finding good caches, I also like to read good logs, and try to insure that there is a reason for a good log. We all need to treat caches like our own, and trade fairly if contents are part of the fun, to keep caches friendly for everyone.
A milestone cleverly disguised as a lonely cache. Now that’s a novel idea! Who would have thought. It’s been a long time coming, and finally the Lonely Cache Game got my good friend out trekkin around in the snow finding some caches. Anything to hold off one of those puzzle placements for a few more hours! Congrats, Alex, there is still hope that your cache finds will stay ahead of your placements!
Sure, I’d be willing to move a puzzle final from a park unless it was an ammo can and hard to place somewhere else. I do have one like that, but the “park” it’s in has about twenty square miles of open space so that won’t likely come up, and the rest of my five total puzzles are in similarly large “parks” with little cache saturation, except for a couple I inherited or adopted. I think the idea of moving a puzzle final that only has a log and is in a nano or key-holder sounds perfectly suitable unless the location is tied to the puzzle theme, which in some cases it is.
Now, now…. play nice! I was being puzzled at the time.
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