Geocaching with "thepaytons"

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!

One of our geocoins took a 2,400 mile trip recently, from Georgia to Oregon. "Georgia (Appalachian Trail) On My Mind" was brought to a geocaching event in a town called Rogue River, and from there has been roaming around that state a bit. It’s trying to go to the country of Georgia, so hopefully someone can get it off this continent sometime in the future.

The other coin, "Just Shoot Me", which wants to get pictures of it taken and uploaded to the site, has apparently gone missing. It’s last known location was a cache near Montreal, Quebec, but that was 7 months ago, and, while other cachers have found that cache, no one has recorded picking up the coin (nor the one that I had also brought up to Canada on a business trip; both coins got moved and both have stopped). I’ve registered this geocoin with the site "tb-rescue.com" which allows people to register apparently lost (or non-moving) travel bugs. Others choose an area in which to get alerts for when a travel bug needs to be moved. We did get one group who said that, last March, they were going to try to locate the cache and rescue the coin, but no word since then. Ah well, all part of the game. These things get lost.