Welcome to my World of Wonderment

Our planet is a neat place, full of weird and unusual people doing weird and unusual things. One oddball thing I like to do is geocache. What other activity is there that makes people travel hundreds of miles to climb a mountain, wade a river, and fight a Bigfoot, just to be the first person to sign a piece of paper rolled up in a 35mm film canister stuffed in the knot hole of a tree? I can't think of any other sport that has such a great mix of technology and the wonderful outdoors. A lot of geocaches are placed in a beautiful setting, or hidden in a challenging or unique way, or in a historical setting. Geocaching allows the finder to share in some of the hiders favorite places, and along the way you get to meet some interesting characters, and occasionally learn something new. While this blog is primarily a geocaching blog, I also use this place to post the occasional funny video or weird news story, or as a platform to rant or rave about something I really have to share. But for the most part this website is about you, the weirdo walking around in circles, talking into your GPS unit like it's a phone, pretending your taking pictures of a phone booth to find find the tiniest micro-cache, or circling your car around and around a light pole in a parking lot trying to retrieve a cache without even getting out of your car.

6/16/09

What, Me Worry? or: How I Learned to Stop Complaining and Love the Coin

This is the story behind the geocache I recently had published "What, Me Worry"  I'm sure some people are curious at to why I dedicated a cache to the reviewers, and in particular The Mad Reviewer. 



A few months ago, the only interaction I had ever had with a reviewer were a few short suggestions about difficulty ratings, or attributes, the general sort of things that go along with trying to get your cache published on Geocaching.com.  Then in April, I published two caches, that I thought were going to be an on going series called What/Where.  I have wrote about those caches in more detail here previously, but basically I posted a satellite image from Google Earth of where the cache was hidden and that was it.  The local reviewers published them, the caches had a few finds, and they received positive feedback.  But for reasons not of my local reviewers doing, they had to be archived.  I was a little upset at first and I sent the reviewers a note to pass along my concerns about my caches being archived, for no good reason in my opinion at the time, to whom ever wanted them archived. I never heard back from the reviewers, and afterward I thought maybe I shouldn't have voiced my complaint. Hey it's just a game, and if I want to play with the frog, I have to play by his rules.  I also realized that geocaching.com is not the only place to post a puzzle cache. (But it is the place with the most traffic)

After that, things began to change slowly.  Realizing the human element behind the reviewers, I started leaving more and more detailed reviewer notes, I even joked a little.  Then I published "The Deam Wilderness Watering Hole."  I left a question in the reviewer notes and the The Mad Reviewer kindly provided an answer, and even suggested a funny name.  And over the last couple of months, every time I have published a cache I have tried to be more and more personal in my reviewer notes.

Then out of the blue I recieved an email from The Mad Reviewer.  She (I'll refer to The Mad Reviewer as female, I don't know if TMR is male or female, but I have a feeling she is female, if I'm wrong I appologize) says she wants to send me a gift.  She explained that she had recieved some special volunteer items, and had decided to give them away to cachers that met a few key criteria.  She felt that I placed neat and interesting caches, and I was also kind to the reviewers and other cachers.  Now I don't think I am any more deserving than any other cacher, but hey if being nice to my fellow humans gains me accolades, I'll take them.  So after a few more email exchanges, she let's me know that I should be receiving something in my mailbox soon.

Well after nearly wearing the hinge out on the door to my mailbox, the post man finally left me my present.  In amongst all of the bills and junk mail I found the following:

TheMuchAnticipatedEnvelopeedited.jpg picture by djhobby

TheContentsUnveiled.jpg picture by djhobby

ThePostCard.jpg picture by djhobby

GeoCoinPublish.jpg picture by djhobby

GeoCoinArchive.jpg picture by djhobby

Now how cool is that!  I feel like I won the Geocaching lottery.

And that's the story of "What, Me Worry? or: How I learned to stop complaining and love the coin!