Final Post Due for Project

Well, here we are at the final required post for my project. I know what you are thinking; I bet he is never going to post again. Well, I hope that for my sake you are wrong. I fully intend to continue this blog and my website simply because I enjoy doing it. Don’t get me wrong, I may be away from the thing for a little while with my vacation coming up and moving back home. However, I do not want anyone to think I am just giving up that easy. Anyways, looking back on this project I must say that I am completely satisfied with what I have accomplished. My professor told us to create a blog for something we love and I did just that. Geocaching has been my most intense hobby for quite some time now and that is something I can guarantee will stick with me for a very long time. I can also admit that in the beginning I may have thought this to be a little bit much. It just seemed like we may be doing this for no real gain. However, once I got into the swing of things I came to realize that it did not seem like I was being forced to do any of this. Creating this blog and website became something I enjoyed and I have this class and my professor to thank for that. So, as you read this blog post, professor, I thank you for giving me this opportunity to create something such as this. It has opened my eyes on a whole new aspect of the business world and I fully intend to take what I have learned from doing this project and hopefully applying it to my career in the future. I truly did enjoy creating this e-business and learned a lot along the way. I even made a few bucks which I thought was going to be impossible. All in all, this was a fun experience and I am glad that I was able to gain so much from it. Thank you again.

Caches in a Series

Many cache hiders like to create some sort of series when hiding different caches. This is not only fun for them, but it can turn out to be very joyful for the finder as well if done right. I feel like a lot of cachers like to find cache series simply because we assume that it is going to be well thought out and interesting. Most of the time this is completely true and the series is one that we will never forget. I am trying to think back and as of now I cannot say that Erin and I have ever gotten a complete cache series accomplished. In our defense, the few series in our area are very in depth and we simply do not have the time necessary to do them. However, I do not like to make excuses. I am sure we could have done some if we were not looking for the almighty numbers. The one that always remains in my mind, however, is one done by a fairly well-known cacher in the Bloomington area. She incorporated the flavors Jelly Belly jellybeans in starting a cache series called “Evry Flvr.” Do not ask me why she misspelled the words because I have no idea. Anyways, the caches were fun, because they were not actual flavors. For instance, one was called Evry Flvr – Booger. It was quite interesting to find the cache only to discover that it was submerged in goo like substance also known as slime. That stuff did not come off our hands for a few good days. We did not care thought because the cache was so ingenious. Unfortunately, several of these caches had to be archived for reasons that I have no control nor do I know. None the less, it is series such as this that keep cachers coming back to complete them. I highly recommend that at some point in your caching career that you either hide or find a series. Better yet, do both because you will not regret it.

Kids and Caching

I have come to recognize that caching for kids is much like when a husband enjoys caching while the wife does not. It is hit or miss somewhat compared to that. Sometimes kids will enjoy caching and always want to tag along as much as possible. However, there are also other instances when they absolutely hate the idea and will do anything to avoid it. I have two little sisters and I can tell you that they each display the opposite characteristic. My youngest sister, Jill, would love nothing more than to cache everyday as long as my dad is going. She is always his little helper whenever they go caching. In fact, she gets angry when my dad will occasionally go and grab a cache on lunch while at work. She feels left out and therefore lets my dad hear about it when he gets home and she has already inevitably checked his profile to notice that his cache count went up. I personally get a kick out of it. I must give her credit though because last year she got a tick on her and I thought my dad was doomed. I was positive that he had lost his geocaching partner all because of some stupid little bug. To my surprise she was back out in the field the next time he went out. My dad is now beginning to fear that Jill will “grow out” of this phase and want to forget about geocaching. Colleen, my other sister quite possibly has done this. She enjoyed the idea a few years back when my dad first joined the site but now she has moved on to bigger and better things. My dad and Jill will ask her to go with every time and every time she will say no. I am not sure what caused her to dislike geocaching, but I know my dad wishes that the urge to quit does not hit Jill. I hope so to because there is no way he will ever be able to get my mom out in the woods.

Numbers, Numbers, and More Numbers

I have only been into geocaching for a little over a year and already I have begun to notice one of the key trends that cachers are leaning towards. It appears as though obtaining higher cache numbers is the key to this era of geocaching. Gone are the days when people will simply go out and look for a few multi caches for a thrill. Traditional caches are by far the most popular cache found and it makes sense as to why. Don’t get me wrong, I still do believe that the other specialty caches do get found a fair amount of the time. However, it has become more apparent that cachers want to get out there and find as many caches as possible in as little of time. I myself am guilty of this and I alright with admitting that. There have been days when Erin and I are aiming for 50 finds (which is still little compared to the veterans) and all of them will be traditional. There are also those times when we try to mix it up and try to search out the other caches. Those days we try to recognize that numbers are not going to be on our side. It is more a time to enjoy the environment and also get a few caches out of it. I have come to realize that although it is nice to obtain a lot of caches in one day they are not always the more fun days. It feels as though we are always in a rush with no time to relax and enjoy our surroundings. Time is constantly against us and we typically will only spend about ten minutes searching for a cache before we make the judgment to move on. Sometimes that can be fun while other times it becomes more stressful than fun. I personally enjoy taking my time and finding the difficult caches that I know I will always remember. Now, I say this here, but there are definitely those times when I am extremely focused on getting those finds and moving on.

Geocaching in My Hometown

One would assume that I would like to cache in the town that I will be spending a lot of my time in. However, this is actually not the case. I have a few reasons for this and I think they are legit. First off, my dad, who got me into this whole thing, has pretty much already cached the entire area and therefore does not want to spend time with me canvassing the area. Not to mention, any time that I mention going around my town he will usually ask me what caches I have planned. Silly me, once I tell him he will go on to tell me things about them to kind of give me hints that I do not necessarily need. It is not a bad thing and I do appreciate it, believe me. He does come in handy when I need a phone-a-friend during those tough finds that just seem to elude me. I have always said that once I determine where I am going to live for quite some time that I will clear out that area of caches because it seems like a neat goal to achieve. I do not plan on living with my parents the rest of my life by the way. I guess I will continue to casually cache in my area once I move back home from school. The times that I cache with my dad though will be spent in areas that I would have never considered going simply because they are so random to me. As I said, he has pretty much cleared by my house and needs nothing to do with that area. On top of all that, I just don’t have as much general fun searching out that area. For some reason I have a blast out here in Bloomington/Normal. I am going to seriously miss the area once I move back home for good. There is just something about it that makes it more entertaining for me to adventure out.

The Arizona Plan

With May 18th rapidly approaching, it is becoming apparent that Erin and I need to begin to plan exactly how we are going to go about our trip. I have been running through different scenarios through my head but until we actually get out there it is still tough to tell. A part of me wants to begin picking out some caches, but then again I still realize I have way too much other stuff to take care of first. The vague plan that we do have defined is to attempt to get at least one cache in every state that we drive in. I find this goal to be fairly easy as there are usually rest stop caches at virtually every rest stop. With that being said, I do not want us to be tied to just finding those as well. There are bound to be many more interesting caches beyond those rest stops and I want to make sure we do plenty of exploring into those as well. Also, as of right now, I believe we have five trackables in our possession to bring along with us on the trip. I know I have mentioned this before but we are planning on putting a trackable in every state as well. At first we were thinking about buying a bunch of them and placing them. However, after what happened to our first bug, (see past posts) we are somewhat apprehensive about the idea of purchasing any at this point. A lot can definitely change over the next few weeks and I recognize this. There is still a chance that this trip may never happen. I am prepared for this which is another reason why I do not want to plan too much into it. By doing so I will get myself probably way more excited than I need to be at the present moment.

Last Saturday

So, as I predicted, Erin came into town on Friday and early Saturday morning we woke up with the itch to go geocaching. I was hoping this would happen and was excited when it eventually did. However, we did not know how we were going to go about it for awhile. It felt like we just kept looking at the map hoping for certain caches to jump out at us and scream to be found. Unfortunately, that did not happen, but we did figure out a route that would have us nabbing 20 caches. We had decided that we did not want to go for extreme numbers on this day and rather take it easy and hopefully end up with 20 finds by the end of the day. As our quest began, we were doing very well on the first few finds and making almost too good of time. What I have come to learn about geocaching is that you are never making too good of time. We came up to the lonely multi-cache we had planned for the day and enjoyed the stages very well. We were taken all over the small town of Lincoln. It was all fine and dandy until the final stage brought us to some park that appeared to have not had visitors for years. Not to mention, with the warm weather here, there was green pretty much everywhere causing me to be somewhat hesitant in my trek through the forest. I did not want to get poison ivy my first trip in the woods. Once that one was found the rest of the day was pretty much smooth sailing. Aside from the time that I had to trek through rapids (that is another post in waiting), we were out in the country. In fact, there were probably seven or eight cemetery caches that we ended up finding on this day. All in all though, it was a very fun day and it was great to be caching with Erin again.

Bring on the Nice Weather

Today was the first 70+ degree day of the year thus far and it is bringing about a lot of optimism and also a lot of cachers. I am noticing the website being overpowered with different finds each day as the weather continues to warm. It is definitely nice to see some familiar faces picking up the pace again. It was a very long winter that seemed to last an eternity and I know everyone else is just like me and want to cache as much as possible. Erin is coming to visit me this weekend and I can assure you we will cache. I can only hope that this carries over into tomorrow because that is the likely day of caching. A lot has happened since my last post to kind of put me at ease and not to mention de-stress as well. I recently was offered a job to work with Edward Jones Investments as a Financial Advisor upon graduation and that is a giant weight lifted off of my shoulder. I can now focus on finishing school and caching as much as possible while doing so. It is going to feel great to not have to attend at least two interviews per week. Those can definitely get very stressful, and not to mention, take you away from doing something as awesome as geocaching. With all that being said, it is again nice to have the beautiful weather with us. The sun will be out much longer making for longer days of searching and much less hurrying while out on the field. I can assure you this; I am going to avoid the small three leafed plant also known as poison ivy as much as possible this summer. I want to wish all of my fellow geocachers the best of luck this season and hopefully I will catch a few of you out on the field.

The Future of Geocaching

I was sitting in class today and kind of daydreaming about what the future may hold for geocaching. I did not come up with much but it was just interesting to me to think about and speculate. I am sure all cachers agree that they hope this sport lasts for many years to come and continues to evolve. I can only imagine how many caches may be hidden worldwide ten years from now if the trend continues to gain steam as it has over the recent years. Not to mention, I have been finding more interesting containers as I cache more and more. The creativity of these cachers is unparalleled from what it must have been in the very beginning and it bewilders me to think what kind of ideas we will be coming up with in the future. Moreover, there is inevitably going to be new ideas as far as cache types as the years go on. Although all of this sounds awesome on the surface, I can see where I think some cachers are going to have a differing opinion. There are many traditional cachers out there who enjoy geocaching exactly the way it is right now. The fact that it keeps growing and becoming more popular may cause some of the veterans to re-consider their membership to this fantastic sport. In a way I can see this sport being exploited and almost becoming too popular for its own good. There may be so many caches placed that it will be hard to find places to hide those tough caches that you know no one is ever going to forget. I guess I am torn as to what way I want to believe geocaching is headed. I am hoping there is some type of happy medium where we will all be a happy and can continue to embrace this sport for as long as possible.

Our Arizona Trip Update

Well, a lot has gone on since the last time I wrote about the trip Erin and I are planning on taking over the summer. For one, school has really caught up to me and is starting to what feels like defeat me. Second, I have yet to find a job for when I graduate and that was a stipulation that I put upon myself in order to take this trip. However, I am trying to stay positive about the whole thing and my hope is that we still are able to go. For the past couple of weeks I have just been itching to begin planning the caches we should go after on our journey. However, I have held back because then I am afraid I will get my hopes up too much in that slight chance that we are unable to go. On the flipside, I should have been working on the boatloads of projects that I have coming due in the next couple of weeks and I have been unsuccessful at those as well. Regardless, it does not hurt to have some ideas for our trip still running around in my head. For instance, the very few times I have been caching since my first post about the trip I have been saving up every trackable item we have retrieved. If and when we take our trip we will then place them in the numerous states we visit along the way to Arizona and on the way back. I realize that a few of these we will have held onto for about two months, but I try to look on the bright side of that. A lot of cachers, like me, enjoy seeing their trackable move a great distance in between holders. I look at it like we are doing the right thing in holding these items until we can move them a legitimate distance from its previous home. I have also been in the process of running queries for the different areas in which we are going to want to cache. These are small steps for such a big trip, but like I said, I do not want to get too excited just yet. As of right now it is fingers crossed that we get to go.

This Could Be Our Last Hoorah

This upcoming weekend Erin is coming out to visit. This may not mean much yet, but it could be our last caching trip out here in good ole Bloomington-Normal. With crunch time rapidly approaching as far as school projects and finals it more or less will be our last hoorah. With that said, I am not sure how we should go about it. There are a few options as far as I see it right now. We can go for numbers and grab as many caches as possible in the area and try to clear it out. This would follow our usual technique for caching as of late. The other viable option that I am kind of leaning towards is taking the more challenging approach. There are numerous caches in the area that we have either put on the back burner or simply could not attempt due to time constraints. We have a cacher that likes to place a lot of challenging, yet very fun caches in the area and we have always said that we wanted to get them all before we graduated. This is possibly our last chance. I would prefer to spend our last day in the area finding caches that we will hopefully never forget. On paper this seems like the perfect opportunity to go out with a bang and grab those caches that are found on rare occasions. However, like I said before, there are a lot of constraints holding us back from being able to solve some of them before going out. I have five projects coming up and it looks like the only time I will be able to solve these ones is on the weekend which could severely cut into our caching time. Here we find ourselves in kind of a catch-22. I know Erin would probably like to do the second option as well but I also know she is just as busy as me if not more. It is going to come down to what time we can find leading up to the weekend to figure out the caches we have been dying to find. I am sure I will fill you all in right after this weekend so stay tuned…

Easter Weekend Caching

You had to figure I was going to do some caching when I went home for the Easter weekend. Granted, I was unable to have Erin accompany us, my dad was ready to go on Saturday and I find it hard to ever turn down an opportunity to cache. Not to mention, it can be fun to cache with him and my sister. Anyways, we decided to head out to Oswego where my dad has been trying to clear out for what seems like the past few months. It started out like a day that was going to be filled with a whole bunch of park and grabs of different sorts because we were up to 15 finds within about two hours. You may even find it hard to believe then that we only ended up with 20 finds for the day. Now this is partially because we did not want to be out until dark and because of the last five caches we decided to do. There is a park in Oswego that we had gotten part of a while back when Erin was in town. We never finished it so that was how we planned on ending our day. However, we did not plan for a two hour multi cache. We did know there was one on our list, but we were not sure what to expect. It was solely based off of pirates and everything associated with it was somehow related to pirate language. First we had to search in one end of the park to find the initial clue. That took awhile because there were lots of muggles in the woods and my dad was unsure as to what we were looking for. Eventually, we made the find and realized that we were going to have to go to the other side of the park. Once over there, it took us an extreme while to even decide on what we were looking for until my dad found a container underneath some tree roots that provided us with a map to the cache. It was hard to first understand because of the pirate like lingo but after a quick phone a friend we were finally able to come up with the find only to have to head home right afterwards. It did indeed take us about two hours to nab this find and although it was strenuous, it is definitely one of my favorites.