Geocaching - Treasure Hunting For the Modern World

Sounds great. 30 caches isn't a bad start at all; I've only logged about 12 so far, though there's about 7 or 8 more that I've been meaning to grab soon. Maybe this weekend.

I haven't done any park-and-grabs yet; most of the caches I've found have involved pretty hefty hikes, actually.

We haven't had a chance to make a day of hiking--we plan to soon, though. The park and grabs are definitely interesting -- they require stealth and you have to not get easily embarrassed or daunted. My husband is not so good at those. He draws more attention to himself while trying not to draw attention to himself! We have found some in fence posts, sprinkler heads, camoflouged to look like they are part of bridges, gazebos and all kinds of things! Though I like the urban ones for their creativity, I think I enjoy the ones in the woods more for the chance to be out in nature.

I found a cache up in a pine tree the other day, it was strung up there by a small rope, then at my level it was wrapped around the tree several times and affixed to a lower limb. One had to undo the rope, unwind it from the tree, and slowly lower the cache by letting the rope loosen and go up (like a pully). I filled out the log, traded a couple of travel bugs, and hoisted it up on its way. Cache is named "Tigger's Treehouse" and is in Maryland near Germantown.

Found or put in a cache...hmm. Tough one. I suppose that depends on your perspective on such things, but I found a shark's tooth in a cache once. The most interesting thing I've ever placed was a bracelet I made out of some wire and some old coins I'd drilled holes through.

Creative Travel Bug -- someone from Wisconsin carved a cow out of wood, painted it red-white-and blue in USA flag colors, and named the travel bug "Red, White, and Moo."

For my part, I placed a "Jamestowne" travel bug that consisted of a souveneir coin with a replica of an Engish coin of the time surrounded by 1607-2007 ring. I attached a very small notebook to it and asked people to write in the book their own family's earliest arrival into the country and location (Mine would be Plymoutn, 1621).

Another one I did was called "Haiku Bug" This was another notebook with a travel-bug dogtag attached to it. In the notebook I gave a brief tutorial on haiku, several examples of differnet kinds of haiku poetry, and then invited each person who moved the travel bug to jot down their own haiku, one or several. It's been traveling rather well, and people have enjoyed entering the little 3-line poems.

Finally, I also did one called "Betsy -- the free spirit" which was a medium sized Dora the Explorer doll. Interesting thing about this one is that I did it with my 86-year-old mother who can't travel much anymore. So she gets great pleasure in seeing where Betsy goes. Mother lives in Denver. "Betsy" has been in Virginia, Maryland, Colorado, California (Yosemite and Napa Valley), near Great Salt Lake, and is now in Nebraska near Lincoln. It's really been great fun. "Betsy's" twin is at Mother's, so she gets a kick out of having the one doll and hearing about the other one.

You can be just about as creative as you can possibly imagine in geocaching and in creating travel bugs. The basics are all explained on www.geocaching.com. .

And except for buying the GPS device, the whole activity is free!!! Can't beat that.

I've not yet placed one myself, though I have a few ideas for some. I remember seeing the picture of the pinecone cache you were talking about on the Groundspeak forums. One of the best hidden caches I've ever found was a small tree-stump; the top of the stump was removable, and the cache was a small test tube set into a drilled out cavity inside the stump itself. I never would have noticed it, except it had rained recently and the damp made the cut around the edge of the stump visible.

I know the feeling. I love travel bugs, too. I'm thinking of setting a few free later this year sometime. Possibly this summer.

I set a bug free and it didn't make it very far before someone found it and left it in their car only to have the car stolen, bug and all! Woe is me...

That's why I don't let most of my $9 geocoins out of my sights. I'm such a protective person that way=P.

As for most creative cache.. There was a cache up in a bird's nest, about 50 feet in the air held up by a rope. On the ground, there was a big hunk of wood that kept the nest from falling down. I moved the wood accidentally, the nest made a loud whirring noise as it fell down beside me, and scared the crap out of me. That was an experience=P.

I just found my 224th geocache today, 7-7-7, as well as two others. My primary enjoyment is being out in nature. I like the ones that require some hiking in the woods -- I'm in Northern Virginia not far from Washington and Dulles International. I have a Garmin GPSmap 60CSx that cost me about $450.00. Worth every cent. It has a multiple antenna system that picks up ones location more accurately under summer tree cover than do the less expensive ones. The most geocaches I've done in one month has been 51. I've been doing this since June 2006. Hope to do more this summer than last summer. I could go on and on about this subject, but I'll stop for now.

Oh, yes, I have a walking stick, an old stick perhaps 2 inches in diameter that I smoothed with my knife as well as sandpaper. I then carved "GEOCACHING" on one side and "NANAPOPPY" on the other side -- NanaPoppy is my "handle" when logging my geocaching finds at www.geocaching.com. . I now cut notches inthe stick for each new geocache that I find. I started doing this last month (June 2007) after I already had found 190. So now I have 34 notches following a carved "190+" Kinda a Billy the Kid kind of thing.