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I have Tubbs shoes as well. An old pair of Katahdins from the year before they went to step-in bindings. Most of the big names are good one way or the other. For geocaching purposes, it’s all about flotation. Smaller shoes are fine for packed trails, but how often are you wearing snowshoes to a cache that has seen that much traffic? The higher the weight the bigger the shoe needed. I bought mine with winter backpacking in mind and bought a mid-sized shoe. I’m a smaller guy, so that has worked out well for most of the use I get out of them. I’ve even considered bigger for myself, so definitely go bigger considering you’ll be using them on looser, unconsolidated snow.
“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
Words of Teddy Roosevelt himself. An amazing man whom I still haven’t read enough about.
There’s a milestone that means much more than slicing and dicing the numbers 😀 . Here’s to at least ten more years of those remarkable moments our game brings regularly.
We didn’t get a chance to visit Williamsburg, but we did visit the Yorktown battlefield not too far away. The virtuals there are worth the visit, as is the rest of the area. Some of the Revolutionary cannonballs are still lodged in the buildings, and some of the Civil War era earthworks from the Peninsula campaign are also in place.
We’re sorry to hear of your loss Pete.
I hope it’s a lovely service and you find solace in happy memories.
I’ll be in the minority, but I’d pay double that and still be content. That membership is supporting an activity that brings me great pleasure in life. And since I don’t see the entire staff of Groundspeak vacationing on the Riviera, I’ll assume they are putting it toward at least partially serving me. I would expect more service or content for my dollar.
For a hometown boy who has never left, I have a mean case of wanderlust, and geocaching feeds that better than just about anything else I’ve participated in. Any given weekend we can pick a direction, fill the tank and have an adventure in a part of the state we’ve never seen. Those never seen places are getting a little further between now, but we continue to find the pleasant little surprises.
I do remember that first cache find, and the thrill of knowing that someone put it there and that there were more to be found all over the world. And that first cache was a nice walk to a place worth seeing. That continues to be the reason we cache. Clever containers, smart hides and physical challenges are all great bonuses, but I think it will always be about the places we’re taken.
Our favorite cache in Arkansas continues to be a magnet on a garbage can. Really. But that garbage can was at an overlook on Mt. Magazine overlooking the Petit Jean valley, and fingers of late afternoon sunlight were shooting down through the clouds like the fingers of God. It was a moment that will never be duplicated, and we were there because of geocaching.
We continue to be surprised at the places caches take us on vacation, and I regularly use caches as a travel guide while planning. This fall we did caches while touring the Antietam battlefield, hiking up to Maryland Heights above Harpers Ferry, WV for one of the most incredible views we can remember, hiked around a lake filled with cypresses and visited the graves of Chang and Eng Bunker, the original Siamese twins. Some of those stops were planned and others were unexpected.
My need to see new places has dovetailed nicely with the DeLorme Challenge, and that has become my personal way of seeing America. It’s nice to get the challenge cache, but the journey is the destination. Puts me in mind of a certain Willie Nelson song…
Oh, and the Fizzy Challenges are pretty cool too. Or at least doing what it takes to get there. But that’s a whole other essay.
Sending our regrets now, as that’s my weekend to work. It would be great to see you guys again, and we haven’t been to Devil’s Lake since… spring? Hope it’s a big success!
@Mister Greenthumb wrote:
@Team Honeybunnies wrote:
Yes, but will it make my genitals bigger…?
that’s where the hallucination part comes in
Heh, heh. But really, the life of a troll must be fascinating. I want to meet the goobers that bite on these ridiculous offers.
Yes, but will it make my genitals bigger…?
(Dons flame-retardant speedo in tasteful leopard-skin pattern)
Purely from a devil’s advocate perspective, does the mere act of placing a cache offer the moral superiority to demand behavior from others? I have written voluminous logs when inspired, short and sweet logs when appreciative, and cut-and-pasted my way through numbers runs that blurred together (though the cut and paste logs were lengthy to somewhat compensate).
Not every good cache has inspired me, and some very poor hides have brought me to some sublime places and received much better logs.
While I see the same pattern of less interest in offering a good log that everyone else here is seeing, does that mean that finders should be excoriated for the crime of not caring about your cache?
We don’t have many caches placed, but some of them are very meaningful to me. I have come to accept that only about 10% of loggers will get from the experience what I intended, and I am content with that. I’m looking for fellow travelers, not zombies marching in lockstep.
Just a bit of food for thought. Hope no one is offended.
Heh, heh. Just got back from vacation and we’re catching up on things. This post is now a little behind as we completed lucky #13 while vacationing in Delaware and down the Eastern seaboard. Hope to see all of you soon on the trails as we scale back for a beautiful fall caching closer to home territory.
@Team Black-Cat wrote:
@Team Honeybunnies wrote:
They will only be as good as the imaginations of the placers and finders.
Unfortunatly, the Principle of Least Effort will be in full force since that seems to be the path that Groundspeak paved for challenges.
“You may say that I’m a dreamer, well I’m not the only one…”
Just scrolled through the Show Us Your Landmarks challenge and saw two that we loved, the Sgt. Floyd Monument in Sioux City, IA and the Eiffel Tower in Paris, TN. Then there were the obvious backyard pictures. Some will get it and some won’t…
Interestingly, I think the idea that challenges should be separate from GC.com is a mistake. I think it is a big reason that Waymarking was DOA. The other reason would be the listing of all those McDonalds… Yeah that’s right, the idea of geocaching jumping the shark has been discussed before. I would have liked to see those Waymarking stats integrated into or at least easily linkable from our geocaching profiles. I think it’s possible that I missed out on something interesting because I wasn’t interested in hopping to another site and navigating another format.
Once the Wild West atmosphere has settled, I think challenges have a chance to be something equally interesting. They will only be as good as the imaginations of the placers and finders. If we want it to be “Order a Big Mac at the McDonalds at 4th and Main in Waco, TX” it can be, or it can be “Greet the sunrise at Otter Cliffs, Acadia NP”.
We will be trying them, but only as a supplement to our geocaching experience. I’d at least recommend to keep an open mind and see what develops.
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