#Geocache365: Week 4 - August 30th - September 5th

Mark: Week 4 found us still working on finding the stages of Golden Valley History and then on Sunday we headed out for a 1 day geocaching road trip to grab a couple more State Park Safari caches.  Kris:  It ended up more of a hiking adventure than a road trip :)

Monday: Day 22 - Mosquitos were so bad they almost carried off Truffle.

Mark: Out in Waconia again, this time with Truffle and before Kris' chiro appointment we decided to grab our cache of the day.  Kris:  Yikes the mosquitos were vicious!  It was a short walk into the woods followed by a quick signature and carrying little Truffle briskly back OUT of the woods.

Tuesday: Day 23 - Woof, Woof, Woof.

Mark: This was a quick grab on our way out to a Fajita cruise on Lake Minnetonka.  Kris: Cute little park with this pretty walk through area.  The cache had a super cute name and very fitting for the item it was stuck to :)
 

Wednesday: Day 24 - Shhhhhhh.... People sleeping.

Mark: This cache was a direct result of one of visiting one of the stages for Golden Valley History cache. Great example of a quick fun multi-cache.  Kris:  Bleh!! I never do like cemetery caches but luckily this multi didn't actually make you go in the cemetery.  You had to use information from within the cemetery but could stay on the outside of the fence.

Thursday: Day 25 - Coffee and a Cache, and yes Kris is throwing her gangster signs for 25.

Mark: After stopping for coffee in the morning we decided to get our cache of the day out of the way early.  Kris:  OK walking closer to GZ it was obvious that it had to somehow be ON this bridge but the GPS was jumping all over the place within 20ft of either end of the bridge.  By reading some of the prior logs, we were able to narrow our search to a particular feature on the bridge to make the find.  One muggle did come by as Mark was under the bridge so he sat like a silent troll while I politely said "good morning" and made it look like I was just hanging out enjoying my morning coffee ;)  Oh, and this was our Day 25 find, hence the gangsta signs.

Friday: Day 26 - Found it as the light was fading fast.

Mark: This was supposed to be a quick find on the way to the store, but by the picture you can see we were running out of light. Can you see Kris in the pic?  Kris:  This is a little less accessible in the summer since there is a lot of tall brush and potentially hidden poison ivy (I'm a little paranoid...) but we found a sort of path in to near the cache location.  There were a few muggles on the trail so I tried to hide as best I could ;)

Saturday: Day 27 - 13 Stages later we found "someones" stash.

Mark: After almost two weeks of visiting the various stages and figuring out the final location we finally made the find.  A very long multi but also very fun!  Kris: This was a fun multi for history buffs since it made you find a lot of historical places around Golden Valley that you would otherwise drive right by.  The final stage was obviously "found" by a critter who packed the cache location full of their winter stash.  Yes folks, we did put it all back before we left.

Sunday: Day 28 - 591 steps, good grief! At least we made the find!

Mark: One of our stops during our Labor Day weekend State Park Safari challenge road trip. The trip to and from the cache is what made it our cache of the day.  Kris:  Holy flip that was one hell of a climb!  I suppose when the sign at the bottom says "difficult, one hour, 450 elevation" we should have had a pretty good idea of what we were getting into.  Cache we were after is called "Timberrr!" so we knew what we were looking for.  A long climb and short hike brought us right to the big beacon lining the path.

#Geocache365: Week 3 - August 23rd-29th

Mark: Week 3 found us not only finding our daily cache but also working on a 13 stage multicache in Golden Valley. I decided that we should try to find the information that we need at one stage every day along with the #Geocache365 cache, so I made a point of finding the closest cache to each of the 12 stages need to solve the final location and this week 4 of the caches were dual purpose.  Kris:  I've always like multicaches so being able to do this one WITH our #Geocache365 has been fun.

Monday: Day 15 - Tennis Anyone?

Kris: Fairly simple micro in a local park. Muggles were a factor in this area today as they are with most parks on a summer day.  Mark: When we walked up to ground zero there were some local muggles playing hoops on the court next to  the tennis courts so we had to keep an eye on them as we searched. We were the only others in the entire park so we looked a bit out of place as we parked and walked up but after watching the players for a little while we decided the did not even know we were there, which is always a good thing when dealing with muggles. Kris can just been seen in the picture on the left side.

Tuesday: Day 16 - Close to the cache, 14ft w/25ft of accuracy.

Kris: Pretty easy find, typical pine tree hide. Mark: This is one of those times when I don't agree with the hide as it is obviously adding an opinion/view point/belief into geocaching. Geocaching should be universal and should not highlight one religion or another. So instead of a picture of the surroundings I chose to focus on the distance/accuracy of our GPS, everyone is different and it takes a bit to learn your particular GPS. In the picture we were actually about 7 feet from the cache.

 Wednesday: Day 17 - Creek/Crick... Looks like water to me.

Kris: This one was a quick find along the sidewalk. I love how I can be staring at my GPS, walking along the road and most people look at me and just think I'm staring at my smartphone :)  Mark: Sometimes the cache hider adds a bit of local color into the name of the cache. In this case the creek in the picture has different spelling depending on who you ask. In this case is it "Bassett Creek", "Basset Creek" or 'Bassett's Creek"? What ever the correct name is you have learned something new about the area you are geocaching in.

Thursday: Day 18 - look out for prickly/sticky things!

Kris: This was a 2-stage near the running track we were on our way to. Road provided muggle traffic to be aware of and Mark's bright blue shirt didn't do much for camo :)  I didn't venture all the way in for the final location due to the bushes that you had to go through.  Mark: OK, I hate these things. The little stickers, seeds and other prickly things that attach themselves to your clothes and shoes when you are walking in an overgrown area. I am actually about 10 feet from the road but even here I had to be real careful grabbing the cache so I did not get to much on my clothing. That stuff really likes to stick to the technical race shirts that I like to wear.

 Friday: Day 19 - As soon as we quit playing around we found the cache.

Kris: Hidden by good caching friends of ours, Trista74. Playground not too far from home. No one in the park today so we had plenty of time to search.  Mark: Playgrounds! These are a real headache and are high on my list of cache types that is dislike. A well hidden/creative container can frustrate you for hours on playground equipment, there are so many repetitive, similar hiding holes and like today, I thought I check all of them but as it turns out, the one that i didn't check is where Kris found the cache.

 Saturday: Day 20 - A nice surprise this morning, an unactivated geocoin!

Kris: We had a busy day planned which was originally going to start by going to a nearby Breakfast Buddies event but we noticed a local cache with a log entry about a coin.  Mark and I are fond of shiny objects so we re-routed our morning a bit to try to make the find in a city park area, just off a walking path.  Mark: So if caches containing Travel Bugs get your attention, and Geocoins are actively sought after by coin hounds then finding an unactivated Geocoin must be the best prize your can find in a cache. Having a bit of inside information that the coin was there didn't hurt, certainly got us to adjust our plans very quickly so that we could go find this cache.

Sunday Day: Day 21 - Sometimes you have to find whatever is available on the way to a BBQ.

Kris: We knew we had little time to think about what cache to grab today so we just did a search nearby for ANY cache that was in the area of a friend's BBQ that afternoon. Nothing super special, just a city park micro hide.  Mark: At the end of our third week, we have come to the conclusion that not every cache we find for #Geocach365 is going to be neat , or cool or even interesting. Sometimes, you just run out of time in a very busy day and have to find a cache as your going from one set of plans to another which  brought us to this cache. It was very convenient, on our way to our friends BBQ and only took a few minutes.

#Geocache365: Our new Project - Week 1

Mark - So last week one of KB's challenge caches came to my attention because someone created a new event to celebrate there completion of that challenge. The challenge cache is GC1AG09 - A Cache a Day... for 365 days? where you have to find at least one cache per day for the next year. And having just updated my Geocaching stats I thought this might be fun to try, my previous longest streak with a find every day was 19 days. I suggested it to Kris and she was all over the idea. So we accepted the challenge and counting the cache we found on the previous evening (Monday) we were on our way.


But rather then just finding a cache everyday we started to think about it and way to make it more challenging and interesting. We just happened to take a picture at the cache we found last night so we thought why not take a picture at every cache that we will be using for our cache a day. We determined that the picture might not necessarily be of the cache nor will is be of us at the cache, but it could be a picture of anything that we found interesting or unusual that we found while we were looking for the cache. Basically a picture that contains our experience with that cache.


Sounds fun right? But we even decided to take it one step further and to Tweet about each cache each day and include that picture in our Tweet. Just a short message about the cache or our experience. We also wanted our Tweets to be found if you did a key word search so we used the hashtag concept # and came up with our own hashtag for this protect. #Geocache365. If you go out on Twitter and search for that hashtag you will find our Tweets.


We are also planning on doing a weekly recap of our finds for that week and include the pictures that we took. So this blog is the first installment.


#Geocache365: Week 1 - August 9th - 15th


Monday: Day 1 - Along here somewhere

Tuesday: Day 2 - cache with a discount

 
Wednesday: Day 3 - Colonel Mustard in the Library with the Candlestick

Thursday: Day 4 - FTF? Nope. STF? Yes and a surprise! #pathtag

Friday: Day 5 - No it is not on Private Property

Saturday: Day 6 - The name says it all?

Sunday: Day 7 - At the end of our 7 mile long run. Nicely Done! Kris: This one is going on my favorites list :)