Time to Move On

I was reminded this weekend that there are sometimes good reasons to call off the hunt for a cache early. The first reason was for these very cute baby birds we spotted about 15 feet from ground zero, so we steered clear of them (aside from taking their picture of course). It's not worth risking harm to the natives (aside from ticks and mosquitoes perhaps -- I really dislike them) if we can avoid it. In this cause the cache was just the other side of ground zero and we found it with much more searching. The other reason we were remixes ofthis weekend was for personal safety. With rain all week, but of the grass was holding water on Saturday, but the mud was pretty terrible. Naturally we went through the mud for a few finds, but the near the end we had a reminded of why we need to pay attention. Drie slid but didn't fall down a hill using the mud as the lubricant under her feet. We found the cache and despite some more stumbles among the group, all made it back in good condition. It certainly wasn't worth the risk of someone really hurting themselves to have one more smiley, and a micro in the woods at that. Both served as reminders that sometimes it's just best to move on to the next find.

There are of course many more reasons, many I haven't experiences in my limiting caching. Please post some of those here so we have more suggestions for what to watch out for beyond these two.

-- Posted From My iPhone

Blocked!

This past Saturday we took a little photo trip down to a little town in Ohio, big for railfans, called "Fostoria." It's a little further from the major freeways than many small towns we've visited, and as such there was no AT&T (or T-Mobile, and SprintPCS was poor while there as well) wireless voice or data service. Being that we were going for a photo expedition I didn't really plan on caching, but wanted to see if we couldn't grab a cache or two. I ran a couple PQs and loaded up the Oregon so I could watch for caches as I drove. Then my back-up was the iPhone with the Geocaching App, but for safe measure I also loaded up iGeocacher with the GPX files I used for the Oregon. Well the Oregon ignored the files for the Fostoria trip and the iPhone didn't have a data connection to be able to contact Groundspeak for the info on those caches. All I had working was iGeocacher. Unfortunately there were no caches around there to find anyhow, but it's another situation where having the back-up unit really helped.

BTW -- we did find a few caches using the iPhone as we got closer to the freeways.

If you'd like to see the photos from that trip, I have posted them to my Flickr Stream.

Getting Better

Well both Firefly03 and I came down with colds. This was a particularly nasty round which had us out of commission for more than a week. Unfortunately this interfered not only with work, but the production of Cache-A-Maniacs Episode 100, and the WWFM IV fell right in the middle of our cold spell. The good news is that I'm back at work now and the head is clearing, the brain unfogging, almost a week after the events. I'm back at the keyboard writing up the script for CAM100 and prepping to record tomorrow. With any luck I'll still have the show up for this weekend, but it doesn't seem likely (if nothing else, I have at least four hours of paperwork to wrap up before going into the office on Monday). At least we were both feeling well enough to make the WWFM IV - East Side Michigan (GC1GPXX) hosted by our caching friends Celtic Cache Trio. Even if it might have made the cold worse (which is very possible since I ended up going through three or four different colds over the seven calendar days I was in bed sleeping an average of some twenty hours daily) it was worth it to meet with many of our caching friends and grab photos of another one of these fun events (especially since I had committed to being the official Photographer for the group photo). I'm looking forward to being able to get out shooting and caching, but now and for the near future I need to focus on getting caught-up on the podcasts. In the meantime I'll be daydreaming of the friends, scenery, and enjoyment Geocaching provides.

Today's Caching Fortune

We were on the hunt last night and following a successful FTF, stopped by another cache — Rochester Rotary River Overlook (GC17M4W) – to find someone had placed a fortune cookie inside. In this case it probably wouldn't have been a problem (its a Pelican container), but would you want to east food from a cache? So our fortune of the day is:
"don't place food in a cache."