My 2025 Puzzle Resolution

I'm normally not one for resolutions, but I made a geo-resolution last year. We started to notice that more and more of the caches on our "solved-but-not-found" list were getting archived. 

Geo-resolution? To find 75% of the puzzles on our list by New Year.

How'd we fair? After removing caches that were archived during the year, we finished the year with approximately 53% found, and we're happy with that. My guess is about 200 of the remaining puzzles are part of geoarts, and we just didn't have the time during crazy last year for that kind of commitment.

⁉️

So, are we going to do it again? Yes. With 237 still unfound, we're going to shoot for finding 50% of them this year.  This may not seem like such a mean feet, but remember - like last year - we continue to add new puzzle solves throughout the year.

Have You Been to McCourtie Park?

I'm sure every Michigan geocacher will say "yes", but have you been to McCourtie Park in Hillsdale County?

In 1924 William Herbert Lee “Herb” McCourtie began to transform his family’s 42-acre farm into a gracious summer home fit for a gentleman and his both illustrious and somewhat shady friends. It was in Somerset Center, and he called it “Aiden’s Lair.” The cost for the renovation and expansion of a simple farmstead into a rich man’s hideaway exceeded $500,000, an impressive amount in those days. [Hillsdale County Historical Society]

The main estate house is gone, but the parklands are amazing. It's dotted with a series of bridges, the country's largest collection of "el trabejo rustico". This is the Mexican folk tradition of sculpting concreate to look like wood.

Yes, these are all made of concrete!

For a geocacher, it's a bit of a paradise. There's a traditional, a county challenge, a Virtual, the Michigan "cache across America", and an adventure lab!

We were there early yesterday morning to finally grab the Historic Caches of Hillsdale County Challenge cache - FINALLY! Checking our logs, we posted our requirements 10 YEARS AGO! I bet you it wasn't as overgrown back then! But one more puzzle/challenge off our list (47% of our "solve list" found!)

If you are ever cruising down US 12 south of Jackson, McCourtie Park is worth a detour.

Puzzle Happy In Clarkston

No matter how crazy the world is, a little geocaching goes a long way!

TaGeez and I are still working on our "solved but not found" cache list - we're at about 45% found since New Years! Today we knocked off 7 more in the Clarkston area. 

Hard to believe there is such beauty alongside the very busy, very noisy Dixie Highway.

MOGA! MOGA! MOGA!

 

MOGA! MOGA! MOGA!

That’s the shout that resounded from the U of M Flint ballroom on Friday and Saturday!

This last weekend was MOGA 2023 Cars Coneys Caches

Our first event of the year, TaGeez and I enjoyed cruising the backroads of Genesee County, where we nabbed over 115 caches and adventure labs including my 12,000^th find!

We enjoyed the Friday Night – Kick off, where we grabbed our swag and ran into friends coming out of winter hibernation.

Attended the GPS Maze at MOGA 2023

Completed an 82-stop GeoArt including the Tree of Shoes!

Ran into our old buddy, Signal again!

Earned the final “Wheelof Challenges” souvenir from April’s Geocaching HQ

And, our most favorite part, enjoyed driving the backroads of Genesee County to complete The Preservers GeoTour GC4D6. It was 9-stops at local nature preserves – so many birds, waterways, budding trees, and 1 disc golf tournament! Our favorite stop was pretty Buell Lake (TPGT – Grand Master Snapper GCA6W9T).

Luckily, Michigan weather was on our side this weekend with 82 degree days and sunshine.

Thank you to all the Auto City Cachers for the amazing job putting this on!

Mystery at the Museum: Case Closed

TA DA! We cracked the case and returned the jewels to the vault!

Of all the challenges Geocaching.com has had recently, this one was our favorite! Using filters to find the right caches and planning our strategies (Detective found Day 1, clues grabbed on our way to Holland, gems found around the state campground and the final 35 nabbed during Midwest GeoBash). It gave a little spark completing each stage and made some pretty hum-drum caches a little more interesting. Then to solve the final mystery to unlock the vault - FUN!

Kudos to the developers at Geocaching.com for updating the app for this variation on the game. And major kudos to the challenge creators - otherwise, I probably would never have opened the official app again. It appears, over time, they made enough changes to make the app less painful (though I still can't figure out how to attach a trackable to a Found It log!)

Case closed!

Michigan 83 County Challenge

Wow! Look what came today! My Michigan 83 County Challenge pin! This is fabulous! We earned it after our #mspcgt adventure in the UP.

Thank you, MIGO! Thank you, Stephen Fritz, for mailing it! Thank you, Ben Zhang, for telling us about it.

May-June Puzzle Challenge

Today begins the toughest part of this Puzzle Grid Challenge for me - needing to find a puzzle cache on 20 different days in the next two months. Hopefully life won't interfere.

366 Puzzle Grid Challenge

Yesterday I listed the 366 Puzzle Grid Challenge under my geo-resolutions. 

I discovered it on November 4th and decided this was just the ticket for me! Now that Geocaching.com has pretty much castrated challenge caches, putting too many limitations to it and killing the joy, this has added extra flavor to our daily caching.

And TaGeez has embraced it with me.

Started this November 4th - drat! 1 day too late

We made some great headway!

My hope is to complete it within a year, and, then, who knows? Maybe a new challenge will appear in Southeastern Michigan. Until then, there are challenges in several nearby states and countries.

Here's a quick checker - how're you doing? https://project-gc.com/Challenges/GC6XTNK/23739 

WE NEED MORE PUZZLE CACHES PUBLISHED NEARBY!

Thankful for a New Challenge

Something new on the horizon.

TaGeez and I took up a new challenge this month. Someone posted on one of the FB sites of a Puzzle Grid Challenge.  The checker is for a German cache, but this challenge can be found all over the US and Canada, too. 

Simply, find a puzzle cache on each date of the year. I checked it out and am relatively close to success - BOOYA! I'm pretty excited because after 6+ years of cache-a-day I'm needing a new motivator. With the exception of November 3rd (I heard of this challenge on the 4th) TaGeez and I cleaned up November and are looking at the 8 needed days in December. Our new goal is to complete this by end of next year. Luckily we have Leap Day.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

I'm thankful for all our geocaching friends and experiences!

We’re In Pursuit

TaGeez and I have already earned 4 planets in the first two days. This is the fun way to complete this challenge!

Looking at my Friends League, quite a few have already earned all 10 of them. I'm seeing this on the YMBAGI Facebook group, too. Some of my friends decided to save themselves the trouble of earning points by dropping their trackable collection into a geocache - 4 points apiece.  I'm not judging - everybody plays the game their own way. 

Planetary Pursuit Scoring

What are the 10 souvenirs that I can earn?

Souvenirs	Points needed on the Friend League (individual)
Planetary Pursuit: Earth	5 points
Planetary Pursuit: Venus	10 points
Planetary Pursuit: Mercury	20 points
Planetary Pursuit: Mars	40 points
Planetary Pursuit: Jupiter	65 points
Planetary Pursuit: Saturn	100 points
Planetary Pursuit: Uranus	200 points
Planetary Pursuit: Neptune	300 points
Planetary Pursuit: Pluto	500 points
Official Space Explorer	Collect all planet souvenirs (500 points) and earn this meta souvenir.

How can I earn points?

If you log a cache, attend an event, or perform other geocaching actions, you collect points.

Action	Point value
Log a Found it on any geocache (Traditional, Virtual, Webcam, Wherigo)	5
Log a Found it on a Multi-Cache or Letterbox Hybrid	10
Log a Found it on a Mystery Cache or EarthCache	15
Log a Found it on a geocache with 10 or more Favorite points	15
Attend any event	15
Drop off trackable	4

Source

Planetary Challenge Time!

TaGeez and I have a nice geoart set aside for this upcoming beautiful weekend! The HNY-17-MOTel-T geoart is 59 puzzle caches along the 24-Mile Macomb Orchard Trail.

That will net us 885 of the 500 points needed to earn Geocaching.com's 10 souvenirs during its 3-week Planetary Pursuit challenge.

Ah! Time to #getoutside and #gogeocaching - woot!

The LARGE 1-0-0!

I finally did it! On our trip to Washington DC we stopped off at a WVTim cache for my 100th Large cache! Woo hoo! And that means I finally qualified for TaGeez's GEO-700 Club Challenge! You need 100 of each of the 7 sizes to qualify. I think when the challenge was first released I only had about 2 dozen.

Look how far we had to go!?!

It took several major trips over several years to grab them all. I LOVE this kind of challenge! So many memories while working to qualify for it. #BringBackChallenges

Thank you, TaGeez!

Challenge Cache Survey - 1 week left!

Just one week left to complete the Geocaching.com's 

Challenge Cache Survey!

Expires December 21st!

*I LOVE Sandra Boynton! This is scrapcat at her computer!

Beware the Challenge Checkers!

This past weekend my Sweetie and I grabbed a few older caches which qualified us for 2 challenges. We made the finds, logged the caches and posted our qualifiers.

Fast forward to today. The CO emailed TaGeez to say he didn't qualify for the challenges. This made no sense to us as TaGeez was with me at each cache and is current on his logging.

Lightbulb! We realized the CO must've used the Challenge Checker on Project-GC.com to verify that he qualified. TaGeez is not a paid member on that site so the site only updates his cache finds weekly. So when you run the Challenge Checker it shows he's missing caches because it's source data is not current.

Lesson learned!

My Monthly Milestone Celebration

I ❤ TaGeez. Amongst his many qualities is his positive take on life. Now that I finished my JASMER with our Indiana trip, what is my next challenge? He pointed out that with each new month my JASMER is incomplete again until I find one placed for that month. So now every month can be a celebration!

Indiana Adventure: JASMER Completed!

According to the Geocaching.com blog:

Jasmer Challenge
Popular in the United States, the Jasmer asks geocachers to find one cache hidden in every month since geocaching began in May 2000. To give you a sense of the difficulty of this challenge, there are under 150 caches hidden in 2000 still enabled. Geocaching road trip, anyone?

Actually, as of today according to one source, there are only 115 active caches worldwide hidden in 2000. And I found 9 of them - the last two I needed this past week!

Change is in the air for Fall, so TaGeez and I decided we should cap off the Summer with one last road trip. Funny how the last of the Year 2000 (Y2K) caches we needed to complete our challenges are in our own backyard.  We both need 2 in Indiana and TaGeez needs 1 more near Chicago!

On Friday, August 21st, we rented a car and headed to Indiana.  20 hours and 865 miles later, we nabbed many cemetery caches, interesting Virtuals and 2 Y2K caches! JASMER completed for me!

To begin, we couldn't leave Michigan without a cache.  TaGeez and I have been working on the Historic Caches of Michigan Counties challenges and realized we would be passing within a few miles of a critical Hillsdale County cache.  This one (below), in a beautiful old rural cemetery near Coldwater, is the last qualifier for the challenge cache. You can see it was a beautiful, sunny day.

corner stone GCQ229 near Coldwater

Michigan Spirit Quest #61 - "If It Ain't Red..." GC2YGCA

After grabbing a few more challenge and cemetery caches, we finally made it into Indiana and Indiana's First! Indiana's First is in a quiet area just outside downtown Elkhart with convenient parking nearby.  It did not take long before TaGeez made the victory shout.

Another historic cache down - 1 to go!

Indiana's First was practically a park-and-grab, which left time to visit downtown Elkhart for some Virtuals.

Seen near True 2 Life GCAA14

Along the side of the road

An island park in the middle of Elkhart, Indiana
You can see TaGeez off in the distance to the left

Hail to the Chief GCKN8T

There were so many lovely towns along our route!  Albion (Michigan), Elkhart, Indianapolis, and Terre Haute.  Vibrant, bustling downtowns of all sizes. Lovely to see them so well maintained.  Fresh paint and flowers.  Downtown Elkhart was adorned with painted elks!  Spiffy, eh?

Downtown Elkhart

Lily Tomlin as Edith Ann GC9C0A was not on our original list.  But we discovered belatedly that you can't drive directly from Elkhart to Terre Haute without passing through Indianapolis first.  This Virtual, with 144 favorite points, was just a few hundred feet off the road.  How could we not stop?

Lily Tomlin as Edith Ann GC9C0A
Boost me up!

As per usual on our adventures, we were running behind schedule.  Our plan was to return home by midnight, but, as we reached Terre Haute (and Fowler Wilderness Park) around 7pm (a 6 hour drive from home) we accepted that this trip would also be an all-nighter!

"Entrance" to Fowler Wilderness Park
TheGrundalows legal parking: N 39 20.789 W 087 21.060

This is it - the last cache needed to fill my grid.  November 2000.  There are actually 2 "November 2000" caches in Indiana, but TaGeez picked this one due to its proximity to Terre Haute. This cache also had less DNF's recently and time is at a limit. One day we will visit Turkey Run Stash GCC6 for that smiley, too.

The hill that didn't need climbing

After a few missteps and a hill that didn't need climbing, we made the find.  You can see how hot and exhausted we are below.  We are literally standing on the side of a steep hill, balancing precariously on a crumbling outcrop.  This is why we do this!  Can't you just hear the Indiana Jones music?

JASMER complete!

Hot, sweaty, tired, hungry, exhausted.  Mission complete.  But do we go home?  NO.  There are other things to be seen, including a nearby cemetery and downtown Terre Haute.  Meet Max Ehrmann, author of the poem Desiderata. According to the nearby plaque, Max spent many a day visiting this little corner of his hometown to write.

Crossroads of America GC8938

Terre Haute, Indiana

It is getting late, and we still have a 6 hour drive home.  TaGeez snapped this picture of the side-view mirror as we headed to Indianapolis in search of dinner.

Ok, we were waylaid.  After only nibbling all day, we needed food, but, again, there were Virtuals in our path.  So we made a stop at the Indiana State Museum in downtown Indianapolis.  

Downtown Indianapolis

It's a beautiful area filled with restaurants, hotels and museums right on the river.  This was our first trip stopping in town versus passing on the highway, and it is lovely.  Unfortunately, it was too dark to take pictures of the art lining the river, the Indiana Steam Clock or the terraced fountains.  Like many tonight, TaGeez and I strolled hand-in-hand enjoying the nightlife along the river.

We did make a point of visiting the Indiana State Museum.  They are known for their 92 County Walk exhibit. Encircling the building and the grounds, each county of Indiana contributed a piece of artwork that represented their county (Fountain County contributed a fountain.  Henry County contributed a 3D plane. LaGrange County had these cool pig reliefs).   We walked around this mammoth structure hunting out this artwork in the dark - such a huge variety.  Some pieces were embedded high up on the walls.  Some inlaid in the steps down to the river.  Look high! Look low! Look around that corner!

The one below made me laugh out loud.  As our flashlights panned up the museum wall, about 3 stories up we lit up the Delaware County exhibit!  Hard to see in the grainy photo, but, yes, that is Garfield staring back at us!  What a jolt that caused!  Delaware County is the birthplace of the Garfield comic strip!  What a hoot!

92 Counties GC6BFF
Delaware County

After exploring downtown Indianapolis, TaGeez and I finally managed to find a Perkins restaurant at midnight for dinner.  Then headed home.  Are you aware that most highway rest stops have geocaches, too? We finally pulled in at 5:45am Saturday morning.  Mission complete.

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Below is a collage of my qualifying Year 2000 finds.  Clockwise is Chicago, IL > Atlanta, Georgia > Power Island in Grand Traverse Bay > Grayling, MI > near Erie, Pennsylvania > Terre Haute, IN > Elkhart, IN > near Columbia, South Carolina.

An amazing journey filled with wonderful adventures!  And I feel particularly fortunate that I was able to complete this massive challenge during the 15th Anniversary year of geocaching!

Plus the Advance Search Email from Groundspeak!

Ooh! I also received the Premium Member's email to beta-test the new Geocaching.com Advance Search feature.

First of all, thanks for being a Geocaching Premium member. Without you, we wouldn't be here. In 2015, one of the ways we're showing our thanks is by giving Premium members exclusive sneak peeks at new tools, features and upgrades.

Right now, you can help fuel the future of geocaching. Get a first-look at the new and improved Advanced Search, a tool that's been requested by the geocaching community. It's been completely retooled, revamped and streamlined based on geocaching community feedback. Here are a few of the features we've been working on:

•   Search by Geocache Name - Look for any geocache with a certain keyword in its name, anywhere in the name, not just at the beginning.  

•  Search by Minimum Favorite Points - Only like finding the best of the best? This will make it easier.  

•  Filters - Narrow your search with ease using filters like geocache type, D/T and more.

 

Keep in mind this page isn't 100% complete yet, so some things may change before the official release. We'll send you another email in about a week to get your insights and opinions. We're excited to hear your feedback.

I LOVE the idea of using the Advance Search instead of the pocket queries to gather a refined list. This one below involved finding enabled caches that myself nor TaGeez has found yet.

I'm excited because it generated a list of 911 results (with no paging required - all results appeared below).  I'm able to map my results, but I don't see a method of creating a GPX export or bookmark list from the results, though.  

For those who aren't aware of this pending update, GeoGearheads released a good show on it this week (episode 160.5).  What's cool is that Eric from Groundspeak did a demonstration (around minute 26:00) on locating favorited challenge caches and he searched Detroit, Michigan!  Some of my challenge caches showed on the list! Woot!

I can't wait to give this Advance Search a whirl this weekend.