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Showing posts from 2018

Filling the matrix: 2018-04-16 and the police and the flood

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Did I get into trouble while geocaching? Yes and no. At least I met a really friendly agent or officer? How are the cops working for the sheriff called? Ok let's start with the flood. A dead end road This geocache I was after is located in Mississippi state in the United States, not far from Memphis. Work got me here and I had some extra hours to spend so what else to do then picking geocaches which are helping filling up some of the matrixes? I came well prepared for the trip, put together different trails to hunt down and I also had some simple ones to get the statistics going. I read the last logs of this geocache as well and they were mentioning road closure and that you can still walk to the geocache, so I said some walk won't hurt. When I arrived to the location I saw it will be a bit over a few steps, but come on I flew over the ocean to get to this geocache some walk won't stop me. Used to be a building? So I parked in front of the big signs and the ro

Filling the matrix: 2018-03-14 & a frog

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This time I'm sharing another cool matrix you can try to fill, but before that let me show you one of the cool geocaches I came across just recently, while working on this matrix. The frog on the branch It is early spring here in the Netherlands and the trees and bushes are not covered with leaves, that was helping a lot. The hint for this hide was clear we need to find a frog on a tree, of course all it said was the latin name of the frog... Honestly it is hard to find time to go geocaching on busy days when those days are also short like in winter and early spring and this brings us to the next matrix I want to share. Finds by found date This matrix is showing you on which day of which month you found and how many geocaches you found; the year does not count. As you can see after a few years geocaching it is still kind of empty on the darker months starting from October till March. January and February was in a worse condition, then I decided to fill as many gaps as I

Geocache: A serie for trees

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When it comes to urban caches they are mostly tricky but there are a few hides that are typical; this is one of them. Hiding under the drain cover As we were walking towards the coordinates we spot it really fast. We were reading the logs and the last was a DNF which always makes me worry, and then we still go for these cases, I know it helps me with my own geocaches when someone logs a DNF and a few days later someone reports it is stil there. I always encourage everyone to log the DNFs so the geocachers travelling through and trying to log as many as they can or have a short time and time for a single geocache can immediately know not to bother it could be missing. So what does it have to do with the trees? This geocache is part of a serie which are placed to mark different mostly huge trees in a closeby town. Really a nice serie, we found a few of them already and slowly we'll try to find all of them. Take a look at the tree this one was placed next to. The big tree

Fill the matrix: 2018-03-12 & DNF

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Let me start my new randomly posted information with some stories around the updates. First of all it is jsut sharing some of the matrix data available online for you to see statistics about your geocaching adventure. I won't post all the details, what I will do is put some of the matrixes up on a post with some explanation and guides how to fill them (which is obvious) and how to find what to find. Singapore, at one of the beaches Now take a look at the above photo. I was there and the only reason I ended up there was a geocache. Did I find it? Nope. Was I sad? Nope. Why? Just look at the view. That is what made this search a good memory at the end. Ok, before I get to the full story let me show you the matrix this whole location was about. D/T matrix Yes the famous Difficulty / Terrain matrix or the 81 matrix or some just call it the nightmare. What is this matrix all about? If you are playing geocaching for a while you already know that each geocache h

Geocache: Autobahn cache #4

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And the day came again... I was traveling through Germany and this time on a route I never took before. As it was not me driving I could not pick the stops but I was lucky enough that we stopped at a few places where I could search for a geocache. This was one of them. A magnetic film canister When I found it I was not sure why the magnet was needed, but I found some good use for it at least while I made this picture. On long trips along the autobahn and any other highways it is always good it you can stop to search for a geocache, that is a perfect reason to move a little bit, and in some cases it also make the stop more then jump out of the car turn left turn right stretch jump back and continue. On this trip as I was just a passanger and the driver was always in a rush and the only reason he was to stop was to smoke, that was limiting the search time to around 2 minutes and I had to pick go to the restroom, get a drink or find a geocache. It was not always the easiest pick a

Geocache: Library on the wall

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Back when I was a child I always enjoyed reading; nowadays? there are so many other things to do and working mostly behind a screen my eyes are just not into reading. But finding a geocache, especially in a mini library, now that is what I enjoy. Here is the latest we found. The library that is free Mini libraries are common in some countries, in others they could be just shame on the bad people who would ruin them. I was recently travelling back from Hungary to the Netherlands  with a mini bus service and at one stop waiting for the filling station to open I saw there is a geocache I can walk to while we wait for openings time. I walked there, it was dark, and while walking in the cold I started reading the details to get ready. That was a mini library in a frontyard, in Germany. I was excited, but when I arrived to the coordinates I had to realize that at this time of the day it might not be the best idea to walk on their property and start searching. I was a bit disappointed,

Geocache: Under the branches

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Now this one is a very common hiding technic. I should have showed a few of these previously, but somehow I just found one yesterday and immediately I decided to share. Mostly I share finds a lot later to make it harder to trace back which hide it could be. Or wait a second... this blog is actually a blog with spoiler images... So here we go... See it? It is hiding under those branches If the hint already contains the fact that you need to search under some branches you should not have hard time finding the cache. So the thing is most geocachers I have met so far are humans and also lazy to some level, so when it is under something like small branches it will be covered with branches, but only to the point that it is barely visible. Humans do that with placing the object above in such a way that it is the least effort to put them there. Just look above, most are paralel, have you ever seen fallen branches just all around the place? Were they paralell? or placed close to each othe

Geocache: Close to the beach

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On a very cold weekend what is the best place to visit? Of course the beach, especially if you want to find a geocache as well. There are multiple beaches along the coast of the Netherlands the one at Hoek van Holland is the closest to our house so that is where we went for a walk. Hiding in view As my Dutch is not the best at least my vocabulary is not the biggest possible we arrived close to the hiding spot and searched for a few minutes tried to look up the hint in a dictionary but no result, so we decided to google for images with the name, and then this came up. I had to realize I have no clue how it is called in English. The hint was pointing on these objects Besides figuring out what the hint said it was also a challenge to get to them as they are standing in a roundabout at a busy one to make it easy. Such locations you really do not want to or most probably cannot do in summer when it is even busier. If you need to wait till you can get out of the roundabout

Geocache: Before work at the beach

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It is always fun to search for a geocache at locations where the view is just amazing. This time I was in Singapore for business. I had some time before I could start working and lucky for me there was a geocache at the beach walking distance from the warehouse. Hiding in the tree I walked to the location and as you can see above it was not much search to find the geocache, just in the tree really visible. I was more surprised that it was still there. The only people I saw at that time of the day at the beach were the people cleaning the beach, collecting the rubbish from all over. I was also wondering why didn't they remove this as it is really just lays there. The geocache container A tiny container but lots of fun to find it... or not? I do not mind to find geocaches easy, I also do not mind to put extra effort in finding a geocache. From country to country there are typical ways of hiding geocaches and of course each geocacher has his/her preferred way of hiding. I