Can You Spot The Cache

DNFs

Sometimes I wonder if your average geocacher posts their DNFs?  Some people might think it's a blight on their record.  Or they might think, everyone else found this so why can't I.  Me, I look at a DNF as an opportunity to let the cache hider know a few things. 

First and fore most, the cache may be missing.  You may be giving them a heads up that it needs some maintenance.  I list this reason first for my fragile ego.  Because if the cache is there, I'm finding it, I'm just that good!  Or so I tell myself.  But in reallity I bet I have dozens of DNFs and then the next day someone logs a find.  It would be interesting to go back and count the number of DNFs I've had that were found later.

Other than letting the owner know it may be missing, I like to let the owner know that maybe my DNF is because they hid it really well.  A virtual pat on the back for a well placed cache.  Prarie Partners hid a micro (micro is stretching it, maybe a half micron) on a telephone pole in Bedford, IN once that I must have logged 4 DNFs before I finally found that one.  I'm sure he got a kick out of it, because he knew it was there, I just couldn't find it.  I imagined him pumping his fist in the air in victory everytime someone logged a DNF.  And well he should for that devious little hide.

My favorite reason to log a DNF though is not to compliment the owner on a great hide, and not to let them know it may be gone, but to write a DNF story.  If you haven't noticed, I like to exaggerate a little bit, so every time I have a DNF I try to tell some outlandish story.  I think of it as therapy.  In one day last week according to my logs, I was attacked by zombies, and recieved an electromagnetic pulse from aliens rendering my equipment useless, had a run in with someone dressed as Big Bird, saw A-Rod and Madonna, and was harrased by Poe's Raven.

 April 5 by djhobby (414 found)
As Lyncher and I were walking up to this one we were struck by anvoverwhelming stench. We immediately looked at each other and Tommy said, "Oh no not again." But yes too late, the zombies had risen. It seems like every time we try one of these cemetery caches this happens. We saw them starting to claw out of there graves in their never ending quest for brains. While I looked around for the cache and tried to stay out of the reach of the undead, Lyncher ran back to the car and got his emergency zombie kit. The kit consists of a baseball bat and a light chain mail shirt. Not near the protection of the full suit of armor and sword that we keep at home but it does come in handy if you are in a jam. Tommy donned the chain mail and started swinging but soon we were overwhelmed with the undead muggles. We quickly abandoned our search and decided to try again when the dead stay that way.

 April 5 by djhobby (414 found)
Lyncher and I tried to find this one, but as soon as we pulled up to ground zero we saw an eerie light shoot down from the sky and hit the Jolly Old Elf. After a few minutes of this blinding light it started to dim and we saw some sort of saucer shaped flying thingy in the sky above us. After playing the theme music to Close Encounters a few times it shot off into the sky. After that, nothing electronic or magnetic worked in the vicinity. It must have been an EMP pulse. I love love redundancy, oh wait wrong cache log, (GC1EJ0B) anyway, our GPSr quit working so we have to log this one not found for now.

 April 5 by djhobby (414 found)

As we were parking the car someone in a Big Bird suit ran up to the window of the house right next to the park and started banging on the window. Pretty soon someone called the cops and we abandoned our hope of finding the cache with such a commotion going on in the area.

 April 5 by djhobby (414 found)
We had some trouble with this one. Every time we would get near a big black bird would get in my face and start quothing. After 15 minutes of "Never more" we gave up.

 April 5 by djhobby (414 found)
We tried to find this one Sunday, but with so many people around it was hard to search. Little did we know that the Yankees were having their opening game of the season here. A-rod and Madonna had a huge crowd around them, and of course they decided to sign autographs right where the cache was. We couldn't get anywhere near it.

TerraCaching

Evolouie asked me today if I had ever heard of Terracaching.  It just so happens that I just became a registered user a few weeks ago, and I had yet had the opportunity to try to find any.  Since it was just about lunch time we decided to try to find one.  First off we had to find out what cache we wanted to tackle.  Since there are only 4 or 5 near us we chose the nearest one Patricia.  I manually loaded the coordinates into my phone and out the door we went. 

The terracache was located along the Clear Creek Trail which has 10 or 15 geocaches along it already.  To get to our objective we had to pass by a geocache that I had already found and Evolouie had not.  Neither one of us thought to grab this cache info before we left, but I strained my memory and pretty soon we had the cache in hand, but alas no log book.  We didn't let this minor set back deter us though, and we headed on down the road.

After a short walk on a glorious day, we came to the terracache area, and with a little circling though the briars, we (we meaning Evolouie) found the cache.  On a side note, the Clear Creek Trail has a ton of people on it, even during the day.  Don't these people have jobs?  Two grown men climbing around in the bushes must look a little bizaare, but hey they should be out working and contributing to the economy and quit worrying about us!  Anyway we retreived the cache, signed the log, and eased on down the road. 

My first impressions of Terracaching is so-so.  I love the idea of a rating system.  That is something I wish Geocaching.com would impliment.  I have even kicked around the idea around of starting my own 3rd party rating system for geocaches but I don't quite have the html skills to do it properly.  When you log a cache on terracaching.com you must rank it, which is very interesting.  But the ranking system there is pretty confusing.  There are tons of numbers thrown out, but I don't have the foggiest notion of what they all mean.  So I give a thumbs up to trying to rank them, and a thumbs sideways for making the rankings confusing. 

Something I don't really care about on terracaching.com is trying to find caches in my area.  I couldn't find anywhere to put in a zip code, or state or county or anything. Finally Evolouie figured out to click the map and zoom into our area.  There aren't too many around so it shouldn't be hard finding all of the close ones. 

After finding the cache, I wanted to log it.  So we get back to the office, and I pull up Terracaching.com, and I can't find where to put in my log entry.  After a lot of fumbling I finally found the correct place to input my log.  I didn't quite realize it at the time, but I was FTF.  Woohoo!  My first Terracache and I'm FTF.  Another interesting thing about terracaching is it takes a confirmation code found in the log book to log your find.  I don't think it's like that on all the terracaches but this one it was mandatory.

One other annoyance about Terracaching.com is the registration requirements.  You have to be sponsored by two other members to become a member yourself.  Before that you are pretty limited as to what you can even do on the web site. I'm not sure why that is, but it's annoying.  It only took about 24 hours to get registered but by then the excitement of finding a terracache had wore off.

I keep trying to think back to the very first time I logged on to geocaching.com, and if I found that whole process confusing.  I'm sure I did at the time.  The terracaching process certainly has room for improvement, but it's still an interesting alternative to geocaching.com.