Absocachinlutely! Rotating Header Image

pictures

Long time no cache or post on here!

It’s been a long time since I geocached – according to the statistics, my longest slump of 306 days without geocaching is now over.  There have been several reasons I’ve not cached but I think I’ve started to come out of retirement. A couple of unique cache opportunities and events got me out and back with the caching bug again.

Since the  last post I was able to find Peanuts Playground – a really cool multi cache with a couple of tree climbs but nothing that difficult (compared to others that I have now done) and on the same day do several stages of the now archived Dozer’s domain. There were only 2 stages that I didn’t complete – both because I didn’t have the energy after the other 3 stages and Peanuts AND because it looked pretty scary!  Nowadays I think I would have the guts and with some borrowed equipment I would probably be able to do it if it was still in place.

Just recently at the end of August I completed a 10 hour search for my fifth 5/5 geocache, appropriately enough 5-5-5 and had an awesome time. I took the day off work, the weather was gorgeous and we had great fun yomping through forests, abseiling and kayaking on some lakes – highly recommended. We also got to do a couple of other caches on the route too for an added bonus. Some of the pictures (that don’t contain spoilers) are on my facebook album here

The beginning of this month I was able to meet up with about 60+ geocachers to do Climbing 102+, the second in hopefully a yearly event on climbing trees. Got to use an ascender and a good old gregory to come back down again. 40 people climbed the ropes and signed the log book which is a great achievement. Many people are on facebook so I was also able to make quite a few new friends on facebook too. It was neat to see people of all ages doing the climbs – some of the kids were pretty fearless. My pictures from this event are on facebook here

Not sure what I am up to next, although this month I hope to get a cache or two in Texas which will add another state to my caching stats (and probably my hottest cache trip ever) and I’ve discovered another cool tunnel cache in the local area that I hope to do at some point too.  As fall is coming out, the tree cover will change to be a beautiful color and then the leaves fall to make it easier in the woods for satellite signal so hopefully so more caching days are in the near future.

It still hurts if you fall out a tree 1′ up.

Take it from me – I know.  At least if you were to choose a tree to fall out of, it would be better to fall out of a tree from about 1′ up as opposed to one about 30′ up, like I was in on Saturday. The main culprits are the slippery tree, work clothes (and shoes) and nasty stones on the ground. The shower tomorrow morning is not going to be fun.
Caching in work shoes is not a good idea (by absoblogginlutely)

Tree climbing caches

There seem to be a spate of tree climbing caches – this Geocaching bookmark list shows the Ohio Treeclimbers.

I thought this cartoon from Being Five was rather appropriate –
Getting down from trees is the problem

Slammer47 logs.

Some interesting photos and log information from Slammer47 online – Well worth looking through the photos to get inspired…. and worried.

Extreme Dominoes?

About a week ago, the Andy Capp cartoon was very appropriate for my geocaching adventures (although I don’t swear).
Andy Capp and Extreme Dominoes.
My geocaching profile has the following picture on it.
Extreme Dominoes by Domheknows
I’ve been asked about my Extreme Dominoes photo a couple of times so I thought that the publication of this cartoon would be a good way to kick off the story –
We had been doing a series of caches that involved collecting dominoes and dice as we walked around the country park. At the end of about 7 stages, one of the puzzles involved laying all the dominoes together as if you playing dominoes and then adding the numbers at either end of the sequence. As we were trying to get the solution worked out, I grabbed my box of signature item dominoes out and we laid them on the ground to ensure we were doing it correctly. (As it turned out there were two possible answers – we got the *other* one). As we were doing this, in a middle of a public footpath, so more walkers wandered past and gave us a funny look. One of the people in the team shouted out “Extreme Dominoes” to them and they nodded their heads as if that explained everything and carried on.
For those of you who have not heard of Extreme Ironing (which is where the comment was based) then visit the Extreme Ironing Website with more links and videos than you can imagine.

My Flickr and Geocaching greasemonkey script updated.

I have updated my Geocaching.com to Flickr greasemonkey script to work with the new geocache id’s. To install go to userscripts with a greasemonkey enabled browser to show links to Flickr from the Geocaching website as per the screenshot below.
Screenshot of geocaching.com website showing link to flickr page
For more technical information see my blog postings with the tag geocache2flickr
For those of you who don’t have greasemonkey installed yet, this allows you to download scripts that tweak the layout of normal websites to do various things such as add extra links, remove adverts etc. Greasemonkey can be downloaded from Mozilla addon site

Another 11 caches in North Carolina

The weather today was meant to be overcast and cloudy today so I was hoping to get out and do some caching without overheating. An early start this morning meant I was able to get out and do another 10 11 caches in North Carolina.  All caches were pretty unique with interesting hides or hikes to the cache. There were a couple of caches I was unable to do – one was due to the fact there were about 10 people crabbing right at the geocache spot but all was not lost as I was able to take some photos of an Osprey on the nest and another Osprey tearing into a fish – sounds gruesome but was cool and none graphic photos at the extreme end of the zoom are uploaded to flickr and tagged with the geocache code GC1RMWR. I also got two geocoins, two DNF’s and two notes as I was unable to search due to people in the vicinity of the cache.

700th cache milestone – Jockeys Ridge.

Geocaching.Com stat bar showing 700 geocaches found

I finally got around to my 700th geocache today – an earthcache at Jockeys Ridge. I uploaded some photos from the cache to the cache webpage and a couple of others to my flickr account under the cache name, GC13F27

In order to log this cache I had to climb to the top of a huge sand dune that is roughly the height of a four story building (apparently).  Thankfully it was slightly overcast today, but still hot (the car registered 82 degrees) and I think I suffered from mild heatstroke as I really did not feel well after I got back to the car.  Thanks to Kristen for taking care of me!

There were two reasons I wanted to make this cache my 700th – one was due to it being at Jockey’s Ridge – this is the site of my hang gliding lesson in 2001 which I thoroughly enjoyed (but again got heatstroke – will I ever learn?) and so I uploaded a picture of me gliding as part of the cache log for GC13F27.

The other reason I wanted to do this cache is that it’s an earthcache. From the geocaching website :-

An EarthCache is a special place that people can visit to learn about a unique geoscience feature or aspect of our Earth. EarthCaches include a set of educational notes and the details about where to find the location (latitude and longitude). Visitors to EarthCaches can see how our planet has been shaped by geological processes, how we manage the resources and how scientists gather evidence to learn about the Earth. For more information about EarthCaches, visit http://www.earthcache.org/.

These caches are pretty rare and are also pretty neat. So far I’ve found 4 in three states – OH,NC and NY which means I need to find 2 more AND place an earthcache and then I’ll be a Silver EarthCache Master (ooh-er). I’m not sure how likely that is to happen, as these geological processes are not very common, but we’ll see.

Geocaching photo’s

Most of my online geocaching photos will now be in my Zooomr Geocaching set. I’ve uploaded todays pictures here too.

A cache!

I actually got to go out and do some geocaching this evening as the weather was so nice. Unfortunately I only found one cache, Wyandot Trading Post due to the number of muggles at the other caches I tried to do. However I posted some pictures at flickr and whilst doing this I noticed that the time on the gps was wrong as it hadn’t updated automatically. I thought that the gps’s got their time from satellites (which I still think they do) but they don’t know that Daylight Saving has kicked in. Once I turned it on in the gps the time was correct. I also had to change the time on the camera, but that was because it was set to 8.24am and not 8.24pm which meant the process of geotagging the images was very painful.
I did upgrade my gps by using the Garmin Web Updater which upgraded me 4 versions of firmware – some of the newer garmin gps’s have new firmware available.