MSPCGT: Adding to the Adventure

Our trips so far are more memorable with a few additional tools and toys in our bag.

Cachetur.no

Great tool for planning routes and holding cache details in your hand. Sign up for a free account, import the caches, and arrange the order of your route. The image below includes the cache order with travel distances and times. Click in for more detail.

This was the route up US 23 and the Upper Peninsula. 

Map created on Cachetur.no 

Michigan State Park Stamp & Go Guide

How about a guide to the State Parks? It can be bought at several of the State Parks or on the Peninsulas website.  Driving park to park, we read aloud brief descriptions of the parks. And, at the ranger booths, have the rangers stamp your page!

Purchase at Peninsulas Shop
Actual guide is only about 5" tall

National & State Parks Visitor's Journal

Look what I found on Amazon? Also available in some park gift shops....

Available on Amazon

This journal holds 100 park entries, and a great way to remember our adventures. Each night after a series of finds, I logged my parks, printed keepsake pictures, and adhered my souvenir stickers inside the cover.

Sprocket/Postcards

Speaking of printing pictures... My family likes postcards, but, after awhile, I ran out of things to say! But look at this cool idea! TaGeez and I took a selfie and added it to the back of the postcard to my sister. Now she knows exactly how much we enjoyed the Falls! The photo paper for the HP Sprocket has an adhesive back. 

Let me know if you use any of these ideas!

Favorite Point and Photo Notifications

Oh, the joys of modern technology! Heard a fabulous tip on the GCPC Episode 534 – Useful Apps for Geocaching episode for Project-GC.com and have been reaping the benefits for two months!

Project-GC.com is the easiest way to view your geocaching stats, upload trackable “Discover” logs in bulk, and check if you qualify for local challenges. It has two memberships: free and paid. Admittedly, I’m a big fan, but the $30USD annually does add up. (Makes me chuckle to myself when I see geocaching is touted on all the summer-fun lists as a free past time for spending time with your loved ones. I’m sure that could be done but not by me 😊 THAT’S a topic for another blog post).

These tips are for Paid Project-GC Membership Only - Sorry.

With these two new features, though, I’m hooked even more! As a geocache hider (proud owner of 162 geocaches to date), I will often miss pictures or Favorite Points posted to my cache page unless someone mentions it in their logs. You can’t be everywhere every time, and I wish Geocaching.com had a mechanism to share this info in their “Found It” emails to me.

With a few clicks in your Settings, you can receive email notifications when Favorite Points have been added/removed from your cache, pictures uploaded to a log or if a log has been edited.

GOOD TO KNOW: ShortyKnits from GCPC made a great point about that last one if you are a Challenge Cache owner – Cachers logging a note on Challenge Caches saying they will update it to a Found It log after they qualify. This will catch those who log the note and then return immediately to change it to a Found It log – thinking they’ve slipped something past you as Geocaching.com doesn’t notify you when logs have been edited. Sneaky sneaky!

For paid members of Project-GC, go to Project-GC.com, click the Account Profile drop-down (1) and then click Settings (2).

In the next window, scroll down to the Notifiers section. Check the boxes next to the notification types. As I receive Event notifications from multiple sources in Michigan, I’ve elected to leave that one be. After making your selections, click Update Settings.

Then sit back and wait for the emails! That easy! My first Photo Notification email included all the photos, grouped by geocache, to date. It was a hoot scrolling through them! After that, you only receive emails when someone adds a new photo to one of your caches.

And here’s an example of a Favorite Point notification. This one is a double-edged sword because I’ve watched (with great sadness) some of my friends remove Favorite Points from my caches after they have been archived. If my cache deserved a Fave when you logged it, it still deserved it after I archived it. It earned it, and it messes with my stats (sorry, off my soapbox now).

Never miss a photo or Favorite Point again!

Sight-Oh? Seat-Oh? CITO!

Ah, had a lovely time at attending TaGeez's CITO at Founder's Park on Tuesday. By attending a CITO (Cache In Trash Out) over a period of 10 days in September you can earn a special souvenir for your online profile. TaGeez and I like to give back, but we realized we couldn't make any of the weekend events. So we hosted one during the week!

Great turnout and beautiful weather. We had people coming and going so we took two group pictures. For being Farmington Hill's dirtiest park, we found very little to clean up. But we did our part, enjoyed some snacks, had a raffle, and then grabbed the three event caches placed in the park. Fun time had by all!

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HOSTING A CITO

We are blessed in our area to have CITOcacher. While the rest of us are running around trying to add our names to pristine logs, CITOcacher (Carole) can normally be found wandering behind us picking up trash. She always seems to have a bag in hand, and, if you leave her alone, would be at it for hours. Steve and I have nothing but the highest regard for Carole.

Carole always hosts the best CITO's so when we planned this one, we took several cues from her experience and added a few of our own to the list. Here is our blueprint for the CITO:

• Reach out to your local parks department for permission to host a CITO. Some communities will supply trash pickers (grabbers) and trash bags. Make arrangements for trash pickup after the event. After the event, we sent pictures of the clean-up effort and a thank you to the parks - maybe we'll make it in the community bulletin! Nothing like spreading geocaching good cheer.
• Create an event page on geocaching.com with at least (but more is better) two week's notice. In the write-up, suggest your attendees wear/bring the following: old clothes, boots or wellies, gloves, trash pickers and empty buckets (for glass - kitty litter buckets work great!). Define a clear agenda on the cache page.
• And it pays to advertise. We posted a reminder at the time of event publication (to get on people's calendars) and the day before (in case they forgot) on several local geocaching Facebook groups.



• Borrow a sun shade if you don't have one because CITO's tend to happen in all kinds of weather. Also, use a picnic table or bring a portable table with chairs.
• Supply cold water and snacks. We didn't have any of CITOcacher or SCOOK's baked goods so we made do with chips.

• Bring a logbook and have a place for trackable discovery.
• Don't forget the camera (and tripod, if you have one) for the group pictures! Nothing is more joyous than standing around a pile of trash for posterity.
• Supply trash bags, hand sanitizer, and single-use latex or vinyl gloves. Having a First Aid kit handy is not a bad idea, either.
• After the troops have gathered, outline the areas for clean up and remind attendees when to return for the group photo. If the area is particularly urban (good advice from RATTRAK), make sure to explain how to handle 'Belle Isle flowers' (condoms) and needles. It is generally good to make sure children are paired with an adult.
• [BONUS] Not required, but people generally enjoy a good raffle, too. We raffled off 2 ammo cans (Harbor Freight), one headlamp, one $10 Arch card, and an unactivated trackable.

• [BONUS} We also hid 3 event caches throughout the park (but near parking as we were sure everyone would be tired after working all day and picking up trash at night). Please give your reviewers plenty of time to approve them. After the group pictures, we distributed printouts to all and asunder. Any attendee who found a cache before publication could claim it as part of a group first-to-find (FTF). So much fun watching the roaming band of merrymakers heading off from cache to cache.

This list may vary based on region and country, but you get the gist. Planning is everything. Happy trashing!

Geocaching Watercolor Souvenir Maps

I was scrolling through Facebook the other day and stopped at an interesting image on the UK Geocaching podcast's timeline - it was a watercolor map like this one:

Michigan is pretty fabulous, isn't it?

How cool is that? This is the Stamen Watercolor map setting on Geocaching.com. They were asking, "What good is this for geocaching?" And my first thought was SOUVENIR MAPS!

Look how cool my geo-adventure in San Francisco looks! Display your finds on a Geocaching.com map, change to Stamen Watercolor, take a screen capture, and then apply a frame and text. Look at the cool postcard!

Here's another of the To Boldly Go GeoArt in Westland, Michigan. Which reminds me I have some more caching to do in the area.

I'm grateful they pointed it out. I can't wait for my next geo-adventure. Life is too short - be creative!

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Stamen Watercolor Maps

To change your maps to Stamen Watercolor, follow these easy steps. Don't worry! You can change it back!

1. There are several ways to access the Geocaching.com maps below such as running a pocket query (view results) or use the Find A Geocache search (click Map These Results). 

2. Once you see the the map, hover your cursor over the left side of the screen until the Map Filters slider appears (NOTE: If you see a Clear Search Filters button on your map, the slider won't appear until you click it).

3. At the bottom of the slider is a Set Map Preferences button (green arrow below). Click it. When the Geocaching.com Map Preferences box appears, select Leaflet. 

4. Hover your icon over the Map Selections button (looks like 3 stacked pages) in the upper right corner. A list of available maps will open. Select Stamen Watercolor.

And then, as simple as this, you have a watercolor map of Traverse City!

Ok, I admit it. I removed all the caches prior to screen capturing.

For the San Francisco postcard, I ran a pocket query of my Frisco finds and displayed the results on the map.

What can you do with this?

Winter Caching Tip: Use the Thermos

For Christmas, my sister bought me a new Thermos.

Now, you might think this isn't too thrilling, but I love it. She brought hers to a summer caching jaunt - one of the hottest, most humid days - and she left it inside a hot car (practically in direct sunlight) for hours. We returned and I went to take a swig of water from it and almost died of shock - that sudden jolt of cold when my whole body was a melty, gooey mess.

18 hours HOT - 24 hours COLD

And this is no joke. I left my Thermos overnight at work, and it was still cold the next day. Well made, solid construction, easy to clean.

So what does this have to do with Winter caching besides the obvious? 

I was just listening to the Geocaching Podcast (episode 433), and they were talking Winter caching tips. Co-host Scott Berks (from the mighty Chicago area) had some great tips for newbies, but he shared one I'd never heard (or thought of) before. When caching in the woods, carry a thermos of boiling hot water to unfreeze containers embedded in a block of ice! DOH! I can't tell you how many containers I've replaced trying to free them! (They tend to shatter here in Michigan when you kick them with the heel of your foot - OOPS!). 

And I have just the Thermos for it. This thing is solid. It will definitely stay hot during a trek out into the woods without leaking all over my geobag.

Speaking of Winter tips, he also keeps a rubber mallet in his car to unstick frozen LPCs. And that made me think.... no mallet onhand? Wrap your trusty Thermos in a towel or stow it in your hat and use THAT to tap that lid! This thing is a tough little fellow!

And Heaven help him if I'm ever chased by a bear while toting my new Thermos...

Thank you, WikidKriket, for my new Tool of the Trade!

CITO Bag Tutorial by Blue Crow Expedition

A great tutorial by guest blogger Jason Michels aka Blue Crow Expedition

I live near Milwaukee, Wisconsin and I do most of my geocaching there.  It's a medium-sized city with a lot of green spaces.  This is great for geocaching because you can drive right up to the edge of great geocaching locations without leaving town.  There are places where you can walk ten miles of paved trails, picking up caches along the way, and then catch an Uber back to your parking spot.

Having green spaces mixed in with urban areas also means that they get a lot of traffic and they accumulate a certain amount of litter, so there are plenty of opportunities for CITO.  Recently I have been folding up plastic grocery bags to carry in my geocaching kit. That way I always have a few with me and they don't take up much space.

This is how I do it, in case you would like to try it too.

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Step 1: Get a plastic grocery bag.

Step 2: Spread it out flat.

Step 3: Fold in the sides.

Step 4: When I fold in the sides in Step 3, I make the folded bag about four and a half inches across. For this particular bag I am not quite folding it into thirds. I am not saying you should get out a ruler, but you'll make it easier on yourself later if you think about the width at this point. You might need to adjust depending on the shape of the bag.

Step 5: Fold in the tabs.

Step 6: Fold the bag in half again so you have a flat strip a little more than two inches wide.

Step 7: Starting from the bottom of the bag, fold over one corner to make a triangle.

Step 8: Fold up the triangle. Squeeze out the air as you go.

Step 9: Keep going until you get close to the end of the bag.

Step 10: Fold over the short end to make another stubby little triangle.

Step 11: If everything comes out even, you should have a flap where you can tuck the smaller triangle into the bigger triangle. If it doesn't come out even, try unfolding the bigger triangle part way and using more of the bag for the smaller triangle.

Step 12: Tidy everything up. You're ready to go out and declutter the world.

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I saw this tutorial on the Geocaching for Everyone FB page and invited Jason to share it here. I really like how compact the bags are - not only handy for CITO'ing but also for emergencies.

Compact and storable in an emergency kit. 

For medical emergencies on the trails use them to carry away the bloody bandages and gauze.

Stored neatly folded you avoid the risk of puncturing it while stowed in your bag.

This would also be handy to protect your hand if you have to move something gross.

Dead squirrel laying on the cache, anyone? Reaching into a particularly moldy log? Rain dripping down onto your expensive smart phone? Soggy socks after falling into the creek? 

Add a small personalized CITO sticker to it and leave them as swag in caches for others to find.

~scrapcat

Hiding: What They Don't Tell You on Geocaching.com

We've all read Geocaching.com's rules & regulations for hiding caches (wink - wink), but here's a few pieces of basic advice for painfree hiding from the Southeastern Michigan Geocaching Group.

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What they don't tell you on Geocaching.com:

Check your coordinates via Google Earth or Google Maps - satellite view before creating the cache page. Of the last 4 local caches published by new hiders: 1 was 2 miles off, 2 were 1/2 mile off, and today's was 500 ft off.  By taking that extra step, you can see if you're even in the ballpark! Such a simple step to save the FTF'ers time, gas money and good will!

Missed the ballpark completely!

Hide the cache BEFORE clicking Submit Cache - not 2 or 3 days later.  Once you click Submit, you will typically see the message "due to the busy season, your cache could take 7-10 days for review".  However, we've seen them published as quickly as 10 minutes! Hide first!

Don't disappoint Fiona!

Don't confuse the First-to-Finders! If your friends sign the log while helping you hide, please mark an obvious spot for the FTF'ers. Nothing is more confusing than showing up minutes after publication to find ink already on a log.

Signed and dated two weeks before cache submission?

Rubberbands as a hanging tool will not survive a Michigan winter. Or an Arizona summer.... a Florida spring... or a California fall....

Would you want to geocache there? Don't hide in a spot you wouldn't want to cache in. Bad ideas: trashy, broken glass, no parking, uncomfortably close to an office window, next to a very busy bus stop. Unless it's your property, stay off private property.

Nice spot for a turtle-shaped cache

At least 528 feet means at least 528 feet. If your hide is too close to another, don't fudge the numbers because you will get busted.

I'm sure with the next new cache notifications we'll discover new items to add to this list! Happy hiding!

Find Bad Logs

Here is a useful tool found on Project-GC.com. It's particularly useful if your # of finds is more than the # of unique caches (You have 6000 finds on 5998 Unique Caches).  It's a good way to clean up "bad logs" that can skew your stats and milestones.

Enter your Geocaching name in the Profile Name field and click Filter. It spits back three sets of results: duplicate logs on your caches, your duplicate logs, and your logs on your own caches. If you click the GC code, a new window will open displaying the "bad log" for deleting.

I think one feature Geocaching.com should add is a Reason field. When I deleted the duplicate logs on my caches today (left column), the original loggers were notified their logs were deleted but not why. That would've saved some time when I started receiving messages this afternoon.

Hitting the Big 1000 and 5000!

On Wednesday, November 26th, I found my 5,000th cache on my 1,000th consecutive day of geocaching.

I'm lucky.  I did have many advantages to help me along.

• I love to travel and I live in a cache-rich area (southeastern Michigan).
• I have an adventurous sweetheart who caches, too.
• And I did this as several other members of Team Free Range Lobsters were streaking, too.

I thought after one thousand days, I'd share what I learned. Here are my “streaking tips” especially for winter.

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Incorporate your cache-a-day as part of your routine.  I plan my target cache (plus a backup) as I get dressed in the morning.  Before long, it becomes second nature.  When planning your cache, consider what’s on your agenda for the day – last Thursday the family gathered for Kriket’s birthday.  She chose a restaurant in a very target-rich area so I saved my cache for later that night.

Download a weather app.  According to the weatherman, the warmest part of Monday was first thing in the morning.  By noon we would drop below -3° and have snow squalls.  Hence, I grabbed my cache on my way to work.  

On nicer days, drive a little to get your cache and/or pick a cache with more difficult terrains.  Save the ones closer to home for severe weather days or days packed with family commitments.  If I’m on the road somewhere with friends, I will ask them to stop for a few minutes so I can make my grab, saving the ones closer to home.

Sounds trite but it’s a “cache a day “ so pace yourself, even on a power trail.  Our local Cachers have setup a several mile-long power trail along the I-275 bike trail.  There are multiple places to park and access the trail.  If you grab a cache a day, you are set for the next 4 months (or so)!

If you need a “numbers run” (to reach a milestone or to complete a challenge), stay away from home.  Again, I’m lucky that I’m in a cache-rich area so I don’t have to travel far for a pocket of smiley-goodness.

FTF-runs are not “streak friendly”.  I know it’s a downer, but when you get the notification you may not want to run out and get that new cache 3.4 miles away.  Save it for a rainy day.

Know your local hiders.  In our area, we have some Cachers who turn over their cache hides every six months – make sure you grab them when you can.  There may be others where you have to grab their cache within the first week of publication before it disappears, never to be “maintenanced” again. Another hider nearby has an excellent history series with very basic hides (bringing you to the local site is most important) so his caches are excellent for very bad-weather days.  One puzzle-master disables his caches for the winter and another revels in particularly evil (and unsolvable) hides.

Attend events in inclement weather. I, personally, prefer to grab a physical cache on event day, but events are caches and will add a smiley to your streak. They are also a way to learn the local hiding habits (see entry above). Another reason to attend events…

Team Gates, Alona Spiegel, Caching Fire,
the Grundalows and afishoutawater

Make friends with other “streakers”.  They’re running out of caches, too, so help each other out!  If each of you hide a dozen or more P&G’s, you can get yourself through the winter.

Don’t assume just because it’s an LPC it’ll be a quick find.  Last year TaGeez and I were standing on 6-foot snow mounds, trying to dig out the skirt.  

It was in there.  Trust me.

Don’t assume because it is “high terrain” makes it unattainable in winter.  I can’t tell you how many times we’ve used a convenient snowbank to grab that tree cache!

Create a bookmark list.  You don’t want to be rushing to a family birthday or in the middle of a snowstorm and trying to think of a cache to grab.  Many of the items on my list were recommended by other Cachers on our local FB group in case I need a find in their area.

Speaking of bookmark lists, make sure you have access to an offline copy of it.  I have an offline list saved in Geosphere in case geocaching.com is down for maintenance or we have a severe windstorm, knocking out power and/or cellular service.

Expand your Cache Type repertoire.  Grab those Earth Caches on warm days. Many Virtuals are not weather-dependent.  There is such a thing as simple Multis, too.

TaGeez and scrapcat at the Great Falls of Tinker's Creek

Solve those puzzles.  I LOVE puzzles, but I know so many people who avoid them.  Winter is not only a good time to sit in your snug house solving puzzles, but, in many instances, a good time to go for the puzzle final.  For many creators around here, the puzzle is the interesting part and the final can be a simple park-and-grab.

Surround yourself with supportive friends and family.  Just shy of the first anniversary of my streak, my car died and I had to car shop, relying on others to get me back and forth to work and to the various dealers.  I had just as many offers from friends and family (Cachers and Muggles alike) to take me for my daily cache.  My Dad pulled over on the way to a memorial viewing at a funeral home so I wouldn’t have to walk to a cache in arctic weather.  This challenge is so much easier when surrounded by those cheering you on.

The AWESOME members of
Team Free Range Lobsters!

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I hope this helps, and maybe I'll add more as I work my way to the next thousand.... possibly....