Geocaching with "thepaytons"

We haven’t been intentional about finding geocaches for quite a while now (over 2 years!), but today we had a little picnic at a county park that we used to take the kids to (even our 15-year-old when he was just a toddler). Just into the nature trail was a picnic bench near a quiet creek, so we ate there.

Just out of curiosity, I pulled out my phone to see if there was a cache nearby, and sure enough there was. It was across the creek from where we were, so the kids got over there and found it pretty easily. It’s pretty obvious, so I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to post a picture of it.

Who knows? Maybe this will get us back into searching again!

We haven’t been caching very much lately. I don’t get around like I used to, so that has put a damper on things.

Cache Update: I noticed that we were getting a few DNF (Did Not Find) log entries on our 1 hide at our church. When we went to look for it, we couldn’t find it. It had been hidden in a huge bush on the grounds of our church  (thing a ball about 8 feet tall) behind a large rock that the bush had engulfed. But when we went to look, the rock wasn’t there.

And then I realized that the rock was there; it was just that it was outside of the bush now! Turns out the church had the shrubs cut back by a landscaping company, and the cut back this bush at least 2 feet. The thought is they just scooped up the debris and hauled it off, not realizing there was an ammo can in there. So the cache is probably at a dump site somewhere. We need to come up with a new container and site.

Coin update: Our geocoin "Georgia (Appalachian Trail) On My Mind" has been really making the rounds in southern Germany and surrounding areas. It’s racked up over 23,000 miles as of this writing. There is a feature of either the Geocaching.com website or some geocaching app that automatically "dips" every coin in every geocache you visit (i.e. puts it in and takes it out) so that you get the mileage added to the coin from the last cache you found. This was done by one cacher for over a year, which really put on the mileage. It’s been in Germany, Austria, and Liechtenstein just this past month!

The goal is to get this to the Republic of Georgia, and the closest it has gotten so far is the coast of Turkey. But hey, it’s fun watching it travel around.

Our Georgia (Appalachian Trail) On My Mind coin has really been moving around. A number of cachers have registered it "visiting" many caches in Italy and Austria recently.

Saturday one dropped it in a cache in Austria, and someone picked it up and took a picture of it with the note: “Today we retrieved the coin from wadi 3. We will look, that we find a nice next place for "Georgia". Greeting to "thepaytons" from Austria.” (Wadi 3 is the name of a cache that is 3 in a series, “Wadi Gütenbach 3”.) So far it’s travelled 16,787 miles!

Here’s the picture. Our little coin’s a little dirty but hanging in there.

Wow, I hadn’t realized how far our geocoin, trying to get to the country of Georgia, has gone! I get an e-mail when someone logs it or writes a note, but I must have missed a few.

Just a reminder, "geocoins" have a unique serial number engraved on them so that people who find them in geocaches can verify that they indeed have the coin and they can be tracked to see where they go. That’s our coin in the picture; a tribute to the Georgia section of the Appalachian Trail. Also, there are dog tags with a serial number that you can attach to just about anything to make it a "traveller", "travel bug" or "trackable"; more general terms.

Optionally, you can give your trackable a goal. Our is to go to the country of Georgia (the homeland of my brother’s wife) and then return to home, the state of Georgia. We’d asked people to take pictures of it wherever it went, but that hasn’t happened much.

A cacher named The Lost Patrol picked it up in Oregon in January. One of the things you can with a trackable is to just say that it “visited” a cache. It’s not dropped into the cache, but it does get those miles logged as you go around from cache to cache, and this guy/group took it all around Oregon, logging a few hundred miles.

Then on February 27^th, he must have taken on a Mediterranean vacation, because it next sees a cache in Vatican City in Italy, and over the next month hits Spain and Greece as well, ultimately being left in a cache in Turkey named “Ephesus spontan”. (It’s a premium members only cache, so I can’t get the exact location, unfortunately. I haven’t sprung for the premium membership.) I thought that seemed like a lot of travelling, and perhaps the cacher just logged it at these places without actually being there. But it has since been picked up from Ephesus by another cacher, who appears to be from Finland.

With the 6,000 miles from Oregon to Vatican City, and the hundreds since then, our little coin has racked up over 12,500 miles!

So our coin really does have a chance to get the first leg of its journey completed, to get to the country of Georgia!

I’ve sent 2 of the kids off to their 1st and 3rd years of college, the oldest was out for the day, so I took the youngest on a geocaching adventure down Lawrenceville Highway, the main artery through our little suburb that some folks use to get in and out of Atlanta.

On our way there, a new cache had been place near us since the last time we went out, so we stopped by that first. The software that I use on my Android phone to look for geocaches (c:geo) was having some issues with talking to the official geocaching website (so I found out after I got home). Compounding that was the fact that my phone’s GPS receiver was responding very slowly, so we had to rely on the description more than directions from the phone.

But after a short amount of searching, Adam came up with the find. The description of the container in the description didn’t match what we found, but the most recent (damp) paper log entries matched the ones for the cache, so we were pretty sure this was it. (I read down through the earlier log entries and noticed that some had said they replaced it.)

We then went on to Lawrenceville Highway. The first stop was behind a Kroger grocery store. It seemed like it would be a simple find (all the recent entries said it was easy), but we came up empty handed. Just before we left, reading through the logs, I found that, again, someone had replaced the cache container because the one in the description had been broken. So we had been looking for one thing (a magnetic hide-a-key container). Still, even with the hint, we didn’t find it.

Onward to the next stop. This was a relatively new cache as well. Adam got out of the car, saw the fence staring at us and couldn’t imagine where in the world someone could hide a cache at that spot.

Well this time I found it, and quite quickly I might add. It was a very small "nano" cache; a cylinder about as tall as my thumb, and about half as wide. Yeah, tiny. I’d post a picture with me victoriously holding it, but then that would be a spoiler. Suffice to say I felt good about finding this one.

The next stop was a cache in a row of trees between a shopping center parking lot and a church.

According to the cache description, it’s higher up than usual (though I don’t think climbing would be involved). Combine that with the many trees that it could be in, and we gave up after about 5 minutes. Couldn’t see the cache for the trees.

Finally, with all the heavy (and light) rains we’ve had here this summer, we thought we’d check on our cache, which is also along the same road. It’s rained almost every day, to some extent, for much of July and August, though the good news to that is temperatures have been kept down, and we’ve not had as many 90+ degree days as usual.

We got to our cache, opened it up, and was amazed at how well it withstood the water. There was a paper Varsity hat that was not damp in the least, just to give you an idea of how well the ammo can has held up. We used to have a "waterproof" container, but after it got waterlogged a few times, we swapped it out. Great idea.

Having reassured ourselves that all was well, we put it back and went home. Today’s geocaching stats are 2 found and 2 not.