The Journal

First of all, I want to thank everyone who has contributed in the making of this very special cache. It was a blast. As I told the rest of the crew, never before have I been so miserable and had such a great time!

One reason I was so miserable was I underestimated the terrain for the area. I assumed this place wouldn't have much of an elevation change. Heck it's Illinois! If you look west with a pair of binoculars you can see the back of your head. I even studied the topo maps, and evidently there is some sort of a conspiracy with the map makers, because there aren't hardly any lines of declination for the whole Farmdale area. Some of us hike almost every weekend and we commented before we left that there couldn't be anything in this area that compares to the hills and knobs we've been climbing in Southern Indiana, it should be a breeze. What we soon realized is, yes the hills around Peoria aren't as tall as the ones back home, but man, they were steep. Most of the time it seemed like where ever we needed to go was up a 45 degree hill. Not only up a hill, but through thick underbrush that the deer couldn't hardly penetrate.



Then when we weren't climbing up or down a hill we were usually in mud. And a lot of time we were in grass over our head that when touched released a cloud of pollen right in your face. Then just because we weren't uncomfortable enough, the mosquitoes were as thick as anywhere else on the planet. Top all of that off with a heat index of 100 and you probably get the point. Yes we were physically miserable, but we were having the time of our lives!





We had planned on doing the whole thing in one day, but around 4 or 5 on Sunday afternoon we knew that wasn't going to happen. Especially since one of our team members wasn't 100%. So, we probably did about ¾ of everything we needed to do on Sunday, and decided if we were all feeling better Monday morning we would come back and finish this thing quickly. But, nothing happens with the Journal quickly. On Monday morning, we headed toward one missing waypoint that we had pondered about the night before over pizza and Google Earth when the rain started in. We had hoped it would pass by quickly (there's that word again) but soon it started to thunder, and opting not to add a lightning strike to our physical woes, we decided to hunker down in a nearby Mexican restaurant.



After lunch and some deciphering we knew exactly where to look for Jacob's treasure. Unfortunately, getting there was another problem. But problem solving is what our group does best. I think given the time and the opportunity the six of us could solve anything anyone throws our way. We could probably untie the Gordian Knot, and we could definitely figure out how to beat the Kobayashi Maru, so after some pondering, we found our way to the final and eventually had the log book in hand. It took us two days instead of the one we originally planned, and we were quite wet and exhausted, but we had tackled the Journal.

104 Caches in a Day!

According to Todd Snider, “64% of all the world's statistics are made up right there on the spot”

I have always found it odd that when it comes to math and numbers, I'm a little slow, but for some reason I am obsessed with stats. For instance, I could tell you how many passing yards Peyton Manning threw for last year, just a touch over 4000, but ask me to divide 4000 by 16 and I'm a deer in the headlights. How many caches did I find in February 2005? Twenty-Two. Multiply 22 by 2005, give me a second to find a calculator. Numbers without context scare me a bit.

Since becoming re-obsessed with caching earlier this year I have had one main statistical goal in mind, and that was to find 1000 caches. In March of this year I had found around 300 caches and some time in November I noticed that I was sitting at 700 cache finds, with my goal of 1000 just over the horizon. After crunching some numbers I thought if I could really buckle down I could hit 1000 before the year was up. For some, doing 300 caches in 7 weeks wouldn't be much of an issue, but up till now I was only a casual cacher, just finding a handful of caches on some weekends, and occasionally going on little marathons of 20 or 30 finds. I was so casual in fact that in one 3 ½ year period I only had 72 finds, and had a streak of 601 days without a find at all. All of that changed when I went on a caching vacation in mid November, finding 74 in one week and ending up finding 176 for the month of November putting me just 150 or so shy of my 1000 cache goal before 2010.

Meanwhile a few coincidences happened. First I read a forum post on geocaching.com about a group of people finding 416 caches in a 24 hour period. Well if someone could find 416 caches in 24 hours, maybe I could find 100 caches in twelve hours. So I started looking for somewhere to try to find 100 quickly. The most logical place for 100 caches in a day that was close by was the Indianapolis area. Then simultaneously, a caching buddy of mine noticed that there was a cache (GC21KVT Challenge of the Century – 100 Caches in a Day) published 70 miles away in Indy, challenging people to find at least 100 caches in a 24 hour period. So one day while I was plotting my 100 caches in a day route around Indianapolis, Mickey4Jes sent out an email to our local group of cachers seeing if there was anyone interested in trying to meet the cache challenge of 100 in a day. I immediately responded back with a hearty yes, and gave her my plans, which I ended up modifying slightly to include the challenge cache. Then after a couple of dozen emails passed back and forth between interested cachers, we finally came up with a car full of crazy cachers and a date and time to undergo our feat. So early on the morning of Monday, December 28^th (A date which will live in infamy, in my mind anyway) five cachers, Me(djhobby), MonsterCatAmbush, Mickey4Jes, Geomafiosa, and Mouse! piled into a Durango and set off on our quest for 100.

We started out by finding a pay phone cache in Bloomington. Pay phones are the cachers friends when you're on a numbers run. Unless of course there is a police officer parked mere inches in front of the phone talking on his cell phone. Which is what happened later in the day. We tried to stare the cop off, but that didn't work, so after about 5 minutes of waiting, Geomafiosa bravely (or crazily) approached the car and tried to make him an offer he couldn't refuse, but as soon as she approached, he sped off immediately, letting us make the find.

One other thing I had to consider while planning, was what type of caches are best for a 100 cache run. My favorite caches usually involve hiking and ammo cans, but that obviously won't work. As a matter of fact we didn't see one ammo can all day, and only four caches that were even considered regular size. Of the 110 or so caches we tried, not one had a terrain over 2 and only 5 had a difficulty over 2. In other words, quick and easy wins the race. Not that there is anything wrong with that. Park and grab caches are the peanut butter and jelly for cachers, and the ammo can in the woods is steak and lobster. One way or another you have to eat.

Something we didn't plan for was the weather. When I had first started planning in November, it was still pretty warm, and snow was the farthest thing from my mind. But on Sunday night, just 12 hours before we were to leave, the temperature plummeted and it began to snow. Half the state was under a winter storm warning. By the time we left at 6am we had accumulated 3” of snow. Fortunately the road crews everywhere were very prepared (thanks road crews) and the roads were just wet, not slick at all. Unfortunately, snow literally adds a layer of difficulty to geocaching. If it hadn't snowed, I think we would have been a little quicker on our finds, and maybe found the 3 or 4 that we DNFed, but over all it wasn't as bad as I feared. But it was really cold. It never got above freezing all day, and the wind was brutal. Almost every cache we found was frozen in some way, either to the ground, or the lid was frozen shut, the log books too stiff to unroll, or the lamp skirts wouldn't come up. One lamp skirt was so frozen that I thought it was one of those rare ones that are permanently attached and I kept looking around for another hiding place even though the hint made it obvious it was a LPC. Only after a few vigorous kicks did it burst loose. On more than one occasion MonsterCatAmbush had to use his Rambo blade that he wears on his hip to pry a cache out of it's hiding place. (One time while caching he got attacked by a rabid coyote and ever since then brings protection, which luckily he had a few months later when he got attacked by a crazed rabbit) We all decided that the next time we attempt this, it should be closer to the Summer Solstice than the Winter Solstice.

After getting our first find under our belt, we drove up Highway 37 to Martinsville and made a few quick finds there. The two problems I had plotting out our route were, one, cache density, which we really don't have in the Bloomington area, and two, finding caches to do that none of us had found yet. For years, every time I would drive to Indianapolis, I would usually find a cache along the way to break up the long drive, so I had about exhausted all of the caches along 37, so instead we went straight north from Martinsville, to Brooklyn, to Mooresville, and then finally to the cache dense area of Plainfield, finding 10 or so caches along the way.

We tooled around the Plainfield/Airport area finding everything on our list but one, because of a nosy maintenance man, and then cached our way towards downtown Indy. There is a cache on Monument Circle that I have been trying to find for four years, and thought finding that cache would be the icing on the cake of a great day. But after braving near frost bite for 20 minutes we finally gave up and had lunch. We had been on the road 6 hours and we were nearly halfway to 100. Right on target.

We left the downtown area and slowly headed north, finding a couple of neat caches on our way to what I think of as the highlight of the day, Crown Hill Cemetery. This place is rich in Indiana history. At first I was a little hesitant of putting the Crown Hill caches on the list, thinking that deciphering the coordinates for all of those mystery caches would be too time consuming, but once we got rolling we actually made better time there than anywhere else in the day. We split into groups at one point to get the pertinent info from the graves at the posted coordinates and then regrouped and replotted our way through the cemetery with the solved coordinates. Well, we sort of replotted. I played typical back seat driver not knowing my north from my south regardless of the seven navigational units in sight of me telling me otherwise and tried my best to lead us the wrong way, but luckily Mouse! knew better than to listen to me and let Monstercat guide him through the gauntlet of graves. Later, when looking back at our bread crumb trail with my GPSr software, the phrase “drunken sailor” came to mind.

Something that I find amazing, before June none of us five had ever been acquainted. I had seen the screen names before, but that was it. But here we were, five people crammed elbow to elbow in a car laughing together for fifteen hours. I've been on long road trips with family and friends that I've known for years and couldn't wait for the trip to be over, but fortunately the five of us get along together great. We all first met at an event Mickey4Jes hosted in June, and since then we have gone on a few other cache adventures together, and even collaborated on a few hides, unofficially calling our selves “The Clown Crew” after a particular evil idea we are planning for a future hide in Bloomington. On the few logs that I actually put pen to ink I even signed us in as The Clown Crew 100. For the most part, we tried to avoid the time consuming part of unrolling or unfolding a log and writing our 5 names down at each cache. Mickey4Jes made little postage stamp style calling cards with our names on them that we dropped into the caches where they would fit. If it wasn't for those calling cards I don't think we could have signed a hundred logs, especially with it so cold, our fingers would have went on strike.

After Crown Hill we cached our way north again until we got to 86^th street. 86^th street is nothing but park and grabs all the way across the north side of Indianapolis east to Casselton. Just the way we like it. It was around this time that I started to notice that we had become unaware of muggles. We were in a caching Zen. Ignoring all who weren't part of our world. If there was someone in a parked car nearby, we just ignored them, piled out of the car leaving the doors wide open and started diving into the nearby shrubbery looking for our loot. I bet on more than one occasion we solicited the comment, “What in the world are those people looking for in that bush Ethel?” or, “Did you see that Carl? That man staring at his cell phone just vandalized that light pole!” We just didn't have the time to be very stealthy.

Somewhere around 12 hours into our adventure I realized it was definitely going to be a success. We were over 90 finds and still had 30 finds that I had targeted as being easy and available on our list if we needed them. I was never too worried, but it was nice to see that our goal was really close. Since it was almost unbearably cold, we decided to make haste of the last few and head over to the Challenge of the Century Cache as soon as we could. We grabbed a few more and made the challenge cache as our 102^nd find of the day. WooHoo! We had done it. Along the way each one of us hit some sort of milestone. I hit my 1000^th cache find, Mickey4Jes found her 800^th, Geomafiosa and MonsterCatAmbush went over 300 , and Mouse! found his 400^th We averaged finding a cache every seven minutes. We found caches hidden by 43 different cachers. We only had 4 DNFs. Mouse! made 23 U-Turns and only hit one fire hydrant. Mickey4Jes went through 4 different pairs of socks and two pairs of gloves. We ate 3 bags of chips, and drank 1 gallon of hot chocolate. Geomafiosa made 574 calls and tweets in at least two different languages. MCA told 5 inappropriate (but very funny) jokes and stabbed at least 4 caches. I slipped on the ice 4 times, and had my tongue stick to two different light poles. And all of us had a great time finding over 100 caches in a day! For me these numbers will be easily remembered.

King Kong Chasm

Just kidding.  Monstercatambush was commenting to me one day about how on caches that he's had a hard time finding you post something like, easy find, or quick find etc... so I thought I would do the same on this awesome cache that is not that quick to find.  I started down this chasm from Redhawk's cache "Outback Oasis" and then went to his "Lost Well" cache and then over to this cache.  The whole time I was skidding down the escarpment I was thinking about how hard it was going to be to climb back up.  I didn't see any giant gorillas but there was enough gunfire rattling around through the Deam Wilderness to take one down.

Thanks for the fun!

alphabet sOuP GC1T5Q3

Alphabet sOuP was an awesome adventure. When we finished, the final was unreachable unfortunately because it had fallen down inside the hollow tree it was hidden in.  Some day when I have more time (right) I'll put links to all of my logs I reference in this log.

 August 2 by Odyssey Posse
Darn that djhobby . . . despite the very explicit warnings not to do so set forth on the the cache page, he went ahead and broke this cache.

Luckily, I got a message from him via Facebook on my BlackBerry while I was out and about town. I was able to swing by and replace the cache with a camo'd matchstick holder in a more secure position. And that means I'm able to post this note and set the record straight before DJ posts some tall tale blaming lyncher for the malfeasance that hath been wrought on this poor cache.

All is good to go again!

 August 2 by djhobby
Woo Hoo! FTF (Fourth to Find) That's my goal from now on, to always be fourth to find. I figure by the time I get to a cache fourth, all the bugs will have been worked out. Not so with this cache though. Unfortunately it had taken a little tumble from it's hiding place and was not to be reached. I tried to hold Tommy's ankles and lower him down the hole, but he wouldn't quite fit. Plus he kept screaming about snakes and ticks being in the hole with him, but you know how he exaggerates!

Thanks so much for publishing this challenging cache. If it hadn't been for you we would have never seen so many new places, meet so many nice people, or experienced so many fun times. Let's reminisce for a while. (Cue the harp music and make everything go blurry for a second)

During the course of finding these caches I have been water boarded, Tommy has been run over, met two different sets of cachers, I realized Tommy is blind, Tommy realized I am blind, fowned awt eye caynt spele, realized I can't count, nearly drowned, broke a geochecker, drove 290 miles for a First to Find, realized I'm allergic to bikers, found out Tommy is allergic to rattlesnakes and ticks, I've used the force on muggle cops, been Framed by the cops, met a sponge, ate a giant oreo, learned a lot of history, met tons of orphans, shelled out hundred of dollars for Tommys lunches, composed a limerick, spied on by a guy named Hugh Jazz, learned to add a pair of tweezers to my caching kit, poked a hole in my pants with a throwing star, used your kids oil paints more than they did, made the ultimate sacrifice, got our freak on with a weed farmer, told some GREAT jokes, lost Tommy forever to the carnival life, ran out of gas, made 1,238 U turns, ate 53 bags of potato chips, watched Tommy accidentally swallow a nano cache, but most of all, we have had tons, and tons, and tons of fun!

Thanks for the great times!

 August 4 by Odyssey Posse
Congrats to djhobby on reaching his goal of being FourthTF on this cache. It's a quite specific goal that takes a lot more planning and careful timing than one might think. So kudos to DJ! I'm glad I could supply the caches for such a grand set of adventures to be had by you and Tommy. My final request is that you would share that limerick that you wrote. I need new material.

On second thought, just hold on the limerick. My next stand-up gig is actually in Nantucket, so . . . well . . . you know . . . that would be kind of awkward.

 August 4 by djhobby
Here's the original without any Nantucket references (GC1J2QQ)

There once was a cache 'round a pole
I searched and I searched every hole
I found the cache finally
It was very tinally
Now it's no longer my goal

So now I thought I should compose a new one.

There once was a cache about soup

No, No, I don't like the direction that's going in.

Let me try again.

There once was a cacher named Duane
Who loved to hide caches for the game
He hid a lot of nanos
and used a lot of camo
rolling up those tiny logs is a pain

 August 4 by Odyssey Posse
Excellent! That's some of the finest poultry I've read in a long time. djhobby a poet . . . and didn't even know . . . oh, you know how it ends.

It's a good thing I have a stable of young children who spend up to 2 hours every day rolling those tiny nano logs.

View Under Construction GC1R9YK

 August 2 by djhobby
After trying to approach this one from every direction but the right one for over a half an hour, we finally made it. We made 15 U turns on this cache, a new personal record. On our last turn around near the new road, I looked at Tommy and said, "Look Tommy, Parliament, Big Ben." I think he got the joke, but he didn't laugh. Then he told me that you have a cache named the same thing. I'll have to check it out next time, if I can get around to it.

When we finally got to within a few hundred feet we parked the car and started off towards the cache. Before we got too far, a truck pulled up and a curious fellow started up the road behind us. Thinking we may be trespassing, we turned around and introduced our selves. I said we were geocaching, and luckily he had heard of our sport before. He said he knew of an ammo can hidden down the tracks (GCD4D?), but not of the cache we were hunting. (I said, "View Under Construction?" and he said, "No, I live down the road." ??) He said when he first discovered the ammo can he thought it was used to trade drugs. I guess when he saw us he thought he must have found the kingpins of the whole operation and was wanting to get his freak on with us. Unfortunately we had to leave his company and venture up the muddy road. After Tommy took the track-hoe for a few laps around the construction site we got down to business. Tommy cried for his Mommy when he saw all of the weeds surrounding the cache area, and he didn't want to have anything to do with it. Especially after the "Just Say No To Crack" cache. He said he was afraid of another rattlesnake bite, but honestly I think he's a little scared of ticks. (which we found in abundance today, I'm thinking of changing my geocaching handle to The Tick, or ticked-off, or The Tick Hunter, or something like that) Anyway... as we got closer I was afraid it might be covered up with dirt. Just about 5 feet away from the coordinates there are piles and piles of dirt from the road construction. I thought, "oh great, we travel all over southern Indiana to finish this Alphabet Soup challenge, and on the very last cache we need to finish before the final, we won't be able to get to it because it's covered in a yard of dirt." Fortunately by this time Tommy had the hang of the track-hoe and uncovered the cache quite nicely.

So now we have finished the Alphabet Soup challenge A-Z, so off to Santa Claus to finish, if I can only remember were we parked the car.

Just Say “No!” to Crack GC1NBQM

 August 2 by djhobby

We found this one today without too much trouble. Tommy got bit* while reaching for cache, unfortunately it was in a very sensitive area of his anatomy. I immediately called a doctor, who said I should suck the venom out and Tommy would be just fine. When I hung up, Tommy worriedly asked, "What did the doctor say?" I looked at where the snake bit him and said, "Sorry Tommy, he said you're going to die."

*No Tommys were actually hurt during the writing of this log.

May the Schwartz Be With You! GC1VY8C

 August 2 by djhobby

While I was distracting the local diners with my John Candy imitation, Tommy scoured the area. After he gave up, I went to the trunk and got out our favorite cache finding tool and combed the area. It didn't take long for us(me) to find it after that. Thanks for the fun!

Peppermint #1 GC1WGMG

 August 2 by djhobby
Wow how strange is this? I was wanting to put out some caches in the area, and thought the water park would be an excellent place for an ammo can / travel bug hotel. So Saturday I came and scoped out the area, but there really wasn't any where that was a great location. There is still a lot of construction going on, and all of the landscaping around the parking lot is still yet to be done. So I figured I'll just place a small 35mm film canister for now, and when all of the construction is done, I'll find a place for my ammo can. So I drive back Sunday morning, find a suitable place for my cache, take the coordinates, and go on my merry way. An hour or so later I get an email saying there was a new cache published in the area. I think great, I'll find it today, where is it? And wouldn't you know it's at the water park! Well knowing that the cache I placed is probably going to be too close to the already published cace, I decided I'd better go get mine, and maybe I'll get a first to find on the new cache while I'm at it.

So as I'm circling the water park parking following my GPSr to the new cache, I notice the arrow is pointing right at the cache I just hid. Now this is just too weird, I thought maybe I had the wrong coordinates in my GPSr. But nope. I had hidden my 35mm film can only inches away from this cache! I hadn't bothered to bend over and scan the area as I placed my cache, if I had, I might have found this before it was even published. I was still first to find though, but just barely. Too weird, cue the theme music to the Twilight Zone.

 August 4 by Odyssey Posse
Found this one while we were in town today. The minute I saw that light pole, I felt a magnetic attraction that was simply overpowering. So after I signed the log, I went ahead and hid my own cache right alongside the other one.

No, not really.

But I did think about it.

TFTC!

You Can't Fight City Hall GC184B6

 August 2 by djhobby

Tommy and I found this one as a bunch of carnies looked on. I guess they were just setting up the rides for the Schiezenfest. One of the homely carny girls smiled a gap toothed come hither grin at Tommy and I haven't seen him since. Oh the life of a carny. Thanks for the fun!

Hide in Plain Sight IV GC1P7EH

 September 12 by djhobby
I asked the Monstercatambush on one sunny day
Can you help me to find my way?
You're so much older (probably not so much) and wiser too
Would you help me, Monstercat, I'm feelin' blue?

He said, "You're not doin' too bad, not bad at all
You're just tryin' to walk, son, before you can crawl
You've got stacks of DNF's to the sky up above
Now all you need is to find you a cache"

He sent me searching, got to make it found
He sent me searching, I said, "Look on the ground"
He sent me searching, he said, "Look all around"
And I'll tell you maybe it can't be found

Son, you can find anything in this Geocaching world
But you won't be happy, son, till you find your cache
You can be happy, if you try
Find Hide in Plain Sight IV and you'll be satisfied

He sent me searching, got to make it found
He sent me searching, I said, "Look on the ground"
He sent me searching, he said, "Look all around"
And I'll tell you maybe it can't be found

He sent me searching, got to make it found
He sent me searching, I said, "Look on the ground"
He sent me searching, he said, "Look all around"
And I'll tell you maybe it can't be found

Oh, you sent me searching

Get your daily dose of Iron! 2 GCK3ZW

There were millions of mosquitoes here

 August 23 by djhobby (666 found)
I looked for this one for about 30 minutes and never found it. I'm pretty sure the mosquitoes have carried it away. I tried to get them to take me to the cache, but they couldn't quite lift me up. Everytime they got me about 2 feet above the ground I would slip out of their combined jaws and fall to the ground. I was willing to risk it, if it wasn't for the river. I think they carried it to the other side, and I didn't feel like risking a dunking.

Gus Paved the Way GCJ26G

 June 22 by djhobby
Before looking for the cache, I decided to visit this memorial for one of our local heroes. I have always considered Gus a national household name, but one day at work a couple of younger coworkers proved me wrong. Somehow the topic of Gus Grissom came up and one coworker, who was raised in Illinois, asked who is Gus Grissom. Well I was shocked to say the least, I thought everybody knew who Gus was. Then I asked him if had ever seen the movie "The Right Stuff" and he asked if that was a music video for one of those boy bands from the 90's..... Well after my fit subsided, I thought I would ask another rather young coworker who is also from Illinois if he had ever heard of Gus Grissom, and he said yes much to my relief, "Isn't that the guy on CSI?" What are they teaching these kids now days, especially the one from Illinois.

Anyway, as I went in, I noticed that there wasn't anyone around, and something I've always wanted to do was to see what it would be like to sit in that capsule. So since I was all alone, I availed myself and shoehorned myself down into the Gemini capsule. Now no illegal make believe would be complete without some pretend chatter between myself and Houston, with me making the chhr sound and saying over all the time. Then unexpectedly after flipping one of the million little toggle switches in the capsule, it lit up and started to hum! Evidently they had never disconnected the batteries!! Now this is awesome news. NASA has made batteries that will hold a charge for over 40 years!! Do you know what this means for geocaching? We could charge our GPSr units, throw them in our pack, and not ever have to worry about them being flat again. I was so excited that I pumped my fist in elation... and accidentally hit one of the buttons that controls the thrusters. And wouldn't you know it, they still worked! But unfortunately the capsule started spinning around like a top, and I had to scramble out of the thing before it killed me. As I stood there watching, the capsule started spinning faster and faster, crashing into everything, much to my dismay. But not wanting to get into any trouble I tore out of the parking lot before anyone was the wiser.

Oh yeah, your cache is missing.

Can You Spot the Cache 2

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:

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!