CITO Imagine what we could do...together.

Yesterday J-bear97 and I stopped and found "Pine Row" on the way home from work. I always carry wal-mart/kroger bags in my cache pack so we can CITO any cache areas we visit. To my dismay yesterday we encountered such a mess of trash that we didn't have sufficient bags or other equipment to carry it out. What bothered me so much about it is that this cache site is over the back of the "privacy fences" of an adjoining neighborhood and it honestly appeared that the folks that live over there are in the habit of just chucking stuff over the back fence. Maybe that's not the case, maybe this stuff was dumped by others or blown there by the wind (not likely as it is not an area that should get much foot traffic and its at the top of a hill) but still. We carried out what we could and disposed of it properly and we're planning to go back and clean up more with the proper equipment (gloves, big trash bags, those poky sticks) probably next week.

The ideal/habit of of CITO could be one of the best "selling points" for geocaching if all of us that play the game would do it consistently. Imagine. Imagine what it would look like if we picked up the cans and plastic bottles and bags in the parking lots when we were seeking LPCs. Imagine what we could do for our city parks, especially those where our logs consistently say "I'd never have known about this place if it weren't for this cache if we would just CITO everywhere we go. Heck, imagine the places we could find to put caches if we stopped and CITO'd places we noticed were trashed. Not to mention, picking up trash provides ideal "stealth" when muggles are about.

This is the month for CITO events...and those are wonderful. But what I'm talking about is the impact of the entire area's geocachers picking up the habit of carrying a trashbag on the hunt and CITO'ing each site we search. I remember hearing when Memphis used to get awards for being one of the nation's most beautiful cities. This scene brought home for me why we don't anymore. There are hundreds, if not thousands of caches in the greater Memphis area. If we CITO'd each of them...imagine the impact we could have...just imagine...

No Geocaching Here - Event Cache

I attended my first event cache tonight. It was way cool to get to put faces with the names I've seen in logs and on cache pages for the last few months. Alicia (sskaysee - 1/2 anyway) said from the log it looked like we had something over 40 people present. It was great.

Tripp and the girls showed up late, Morgan had cotillion tonight. I hope they had fun. We overflowed the one room we were in and ended up spread all over the restaurant so I didn't get to talk to them as much as I would have otherwise.

Prior to the event Jessi, who has decided on J-bear97 as her caching name, and I spent the afternoon doing some caching in the area. We finally scored "This Park Rocks!" on our third attempt with a hint from Sprout. We had a lot of fun with "Llama Spits Again", not that we saw the llamas. We did however get to spend several minutes petting a very nice strawberry mare and we also got to see geese landing, turtles mating and a slew of ducks. Our second failed attempt at "rocks" did result in the collection of an entire walmart bag full of trash so we did our CITO duty for the day. We also got our first "skirt lifter LPC" with "Stevi's Cache" I must say, I think they're pretty cool.

No, its not the most exciting scenery, but its neat to think that there are things hidden in places like that, where a ton of people walk by all the time and have no idea they're there. It's like being in on a secret. Remember how it was when you were a kid? Or when your kids were little? And everything, every rock, every tree, every bug was fascinating? Its kinda like that. Geocaching brings that sense of childlike wonder back for me. I think that's why I do it. It lets me not have to "mom" for a little while. It lets me go back to being a kid with a treasure map only this time there really IS something where X marks the spot. Not like when we were playing pirates as kids and all we had for our effort was a big hole and some angry moms because we dug up their yards. And for my daughter, mom's not mad because she's along for the hunt. Its fun to just get out and play together.

I continue to plot where I'd like to do another hide. Like Timbercreek, I want it to be somewhere special. I've asked permission to place one at our church but thus far we have no answer. I'm afraid that the answer will be no. They're a bit nuts about avoiding liability. Sad but I guess that's the "nature of the beast" these days. I'll keep thinking and looking. When its time, it'll come.

I'm itching. I hope its windburn and not poison ivy/poison oak. I don't see any evidence of blisters yet and I'd think I would by now. It could be psychological from finding that stupid tick. I HATE THOSE THINGS!!!! I can find one, flick it off, do a thorough tick check and still itch for days just at the thought of it. EWWWWWWWWW! I was all up in the bush looking for "Sleepy Hollow" today. That's one that's going to have a DNF for awhile. I'm not about to try that one again until the fall. Too many ticks and poisonous plants.

Tomorrow I have to work. Bummer! I'm ready for school to be out, its cutting into my geocaching! LOL! But we have a lot to look forward to tomorrow. Its Ben and Jerry's free cone day! Its also VW club meeting. And of course, I'm planning on caching between the two events. :) Priorities you know. Speaking of priorities...sleep is becoming one. Terbear out.

Ok...I am SO digging paperless caching

I talked my darling husband into giving me his pocket PC so I could try caching without fighting a sheaf of papers on a windy day. We tried it today for the first time while going looking for "Fields of Clover" and "Old Raleigh Cemetery"...it was so cool! I am going to LOOOOOOVE this.

We found Fields of Clover with very little trouble. I'm learning more about how to handle my GPS and what to look for that gives away the hides. There is a geotrail beginning to form to this particular cache, 3 months ago I probably wouldn't have investigated it, even if I HAD noticed it. Today, even though the tree cover was giving me some difficulty with my readings, I noticed the geotrail, followed it to where I thought I would hide a cache if it were me and BINGO! There she was. That felt pretty good.

We got to "Old Raleigh Cemetery" around 5 pm. I'm still not sure if we ever actually found the right entrance. The cache description said to look for a historic marker and there definitely wasn't one of those anywhere that we saw. In fact the sign was the lid to one of those large plastic storage boxes with the reflective mailbox letters on it that said "Raleigh Historic Cemetery". We went on in, thinking we'd find our way to the correct gate and then backtrack from there. Ultimately though the jungle-like undergrowth, complete with aggressive "wildlife" in the form of a fairly loud dog, proved a bit more than I felt like tackling that late in the afternoon with a skittish 9 year old along for the game. We'll talk to Spencersb at the meet and eat on Monday and get some insight and go after it again soon. Hopefully with a weedeater.

Speaking of the Meet and Eat. I'm so excited to finally meet some other geocachers. I've met cgeek and she's awesome. Its going to be nice to talk with folks that understand the addiction. I don't always get to see trippdyer and company at church and other than the CUMC Tech Teens crew that I've also gotten hooked on it most people look at me as if I've taken leave of my senses when I bring it up. Even explaining it doesn't get it across what's so attractive about tromping around a weed infested cemetery on a sunday afternoon looking for an ammo can or a tupperwear box full of "junk". Its going to be quite the challenge to avoid the "catch phrases" Geocaching, caching, geocache, cache, or geo and still get my fix of people who "get it" I'm afraid. LOL!

I want to spend some time tonight and tomorrow playing with designs for my patches and also maybe playing with the shrinkydink material for some "geocoins" for the Tech Teens. I did go back to hobby lobby on Saturday and buy some. It was just too cool to resist. :)

Guess that's all for now. Teribear out.

I found the coolest thing today!

Shrinky Dinks for Inkjets! The possibilities boggle the mind. Photo "geocoins" were the first thing that leapt to my thoughts. A photo of the "CUMC Tech Teens", who by the way now have their own account on geocaching.com, from one of our recent cache runs or other gatherings would make a lovely "signature item" for the team.

I'm still working on my patches. I found a neat product today that I THINK will make my patches "iron on" for those who don't have the time or desire to sew. Its a double sided fusible interfacing and I think that if I do it like I did the back of the last set and have it stitch with the last pass around the border to cover the bobbin threads that I will have made "iron on" patches. Stay tuned.

I'm hoping to hear soon what the status is on the meet and eat for next Monday. It appears our first choice of venue is no longer in business as of last Friday or Saturday. I'm really hoping we'll chose a new venue and keep the date. I'm looking forward to seeing cgeek again and to meeting all the other names I recognize from my collection of cache pages.

In homeschool news...we've decided on a return to no daytime TV on days that begin with the letter T. I think we've all noticed a marked decrease in creativity since we let that policy lapse. The good news is that geocaching is an educational activity and therefore is perfect for those lovely T-days that we've been having of late. Except for next Tuesday. That's Free Cone Day at Ben and Jerry's...gotta have priorities. :)

Adventures with Teenagers

One of my churchkids turned 16 yesterday and her parents allowed her to take today off to go to the DMV and get her license. Another of them goes to an Episcopal school and today was the last day of their Easter holiday. We hooked up for lunch around 1 and then we were off for an afternoon of geocaching. Yay!

It was interesting playing the leader for a new driver trying to follow in city traffic. She did well. We managed to pick up 6 caches today between 2 and 4:30.

Our first stop was "Mama Mia" which we'd gone after without success on Saturday. We'd been searching for a micro and completely overlooked the nano that was the actual hide. I'd never seen a nano "in the wild" before. Those things give a new meaning to the word evil. In a good way of course.

One of the neat things about this trip was that, totally by chance, none of the containers was alike and all the hides were very different. It was a great learning experience for me regarding the variety of hides that are out there in our urban environment.

From "Mama Mia" we went to "Butterflies". This was in a neat little "pocket park" that I had no idea existed. The container here was a metal candle or spice can and it is not handling the weather well. The log was soaked. I posted a needs maintanence log on this one and I'm hoping the cache owner will take care of it because its a really nice location.

Next it was on to "Sudoku Challenge - Hard". I was glad to have the younger, lighter people with me because I'm too old and too heavy to be climbing trees. It was a nice hide. ML took one of cgeek's wood geocoins, I already have one in my collection. cgeek's kind of a celebrity around our crew...we love her hides, evil though they may be. We left a mint tin that I'd been saving for an "evil micro" container in homage to the queen of the "evil micros".

Our next hunt takes the prize for biggest comedy of errors and I truly hope we didn't manage to get another of cgeeks caches muggled. *crosses fingers and prays hard* We went after "Marquett Park". It was a beautiful day and the muggles were everywhere, including sitting right at Ground Zero. I asked ML to stop and tie her shoe and check to see if the cache was where I thought it was planning to come back later and grab it when someone wasn't sitting right on top of it. Something got lost in translation though because she tried for it and got caught. The lady thought she'd stolen her cell phone! After much explaining and showing of the cache container, the GPSr and the cache pages we were able to convince her otherwise. We replaced the cache without further incident and the people there weren't inclined to take it but I'm still paranoid that it will end up gone and we will once again be the last people to "see it alive." Note to self - DO NOT Take teenagers on Stealth Required missions. Just don't.

"745 - CACHE" was left for another day. At least teenagers do learn. There was just too much muggle activity in the area to get it today, although we're certain of its location. It will wait for another time.

"A Walk In The Park" yielded a unique hide combining a carabiner and a decon container. When we opened the cache we found among the swag the dreaded used golf ball so we took that. We left an easter button and a pencil sharpener shaped like a small wrench. We figured that for a used golf ball we were definitely trading up. :)

We ended our day like we started it, with one of cgeek's evil micros, "On The Perimeter". This was one of my favorite hides of the day. The tiny bison tube could have easily been mistaken by the unobservant as some kind of cocoon. Very creative hide and in an area that we really didn't have to worry too much about muggle activity.

All in all it was a lovely day. Good hunting, good friends, good weather. Who could ask for more?

2007 CUMC GPS Easter Egg Hunt - recap

After much plotting this is what I came up with:

Two teams - you saw the patches below.
Two sets of eggs in different camo colors (thank you Walmart).
8 locations (they came in packs of eight)
Each egg filled with a "congratulations you found it" sheet (in case someone else found it before my kids did) and a rubber stamp.
Each team had a GPSr, the hunt booklet and a stamp pad.
I was available to be a PAF if they got stuck.

On the morning of the hunt, I went out alone with the GPSr and placed the eggs and took a single reading of the location. If I had it to do again I'd have done that more carefully but I'm a beginner and I was in a time crunch. I had designed the booklet with a place for the stamps, the rules of the hunt and a place on the back to record the coords for the teams to enter into their GPSr's.

I placed the eggs at various locations around our church and, since we have a rather large campus, I placed the last four and the prize box in places on our campus. This got everyone back on campus for the birthday party that followed. One of my churchkids in team CUMC Tech Teens turned 16 today.

The teams arrived at 2 and were given a gallon ziplock bag containing their patches, their booklets and their stamp pads. And then they were off on the hunt and I was off to get the stuff together for the party.

The hunt ended up taking about 1 1/2 hours and everyone seemed to have a great time. Egg #3 gave them all a problem and they had to call for a hint but otherwise it seemed to be just about the right level of challenge. Team Purple found the prize box first but elected to re-hide it and wait until Team Pink completed the hunt and then everyone picked their prizes at the party. They're all wanting to know can we do it again next year...so I must have done something right. Smile

After the party we finished up the day by doing some loggable caches and we found MUM's The Word, team trippdyer found Fogleman's Revenge and we looked for Mama Mia without success but I'm going back to check on that tomorrow on another cache run.

To see pictures check out www.deltageo.com

Today is the Day



I've got the rules printed out, the logs made, the eggs filled with cache notes and rubber stamps, the swag is bought, the eggs are ready to be hidden and these patches are made for all the players. I've been toying with the idea of a patch as my sig item so I wanted to see how hard they would be to make. I'm pretty proud of the way they turned out. I've got a couple of designs I'm playing with for my person patches but this is a special edition, limited run for the crew that is playing tomorrow. Team Pink has pink borders, Team Purple has purple borders. The bunny is the four colors of the geocaching.com logo. I think they're pretty cute.

So here's the "rules" for the hunt

Two teams - Two sets of eggs - Two Ink Pads

Each team will get a list of 8 coords, each will take them to a different location that has some significance to the Tech Team. Once they arrive at the site at that point it becomes a standard easter egg hunt until they find their own egg. Once they retrieve the egg, they'll open it to find a rubber stamp. There are 8 locations, 8 eggs of each color, 8 unique stamps. They'll stamp their logs with the stamp and them move on to the next site. The final site will lead them back to the church where there will be two eggs hidden and also a swag box filled with goodies for them to choose from. Hopefully it won't rain and all will go well.