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Scottish Thistle Geocoin

This Scottish Thistle Geocoin belongs to SupremeMe. He has recently been bitten by the geocoin bug and has been purchasing coins for his personal collection.  I'd like to give a quick thank you to SupremeMe.  He has been letting me snag photos of them as they have been arriving, and boy have I been snapping photos. He is really getting in to this geocoin thing. Lucky me!  This is one of those coins that is hard to do it justice with a photo. It is very pretty. I am glad to have gotten to see it in person. As part of a collection, this coin will probably never see the the inside of a cache.

I'm cool with that though. [:)]  Someday I hope to have a collection of my own.

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Bailey Dog’s Trakabulldog Geocoin

This is the Bailey Dog Trakabulldog Geocoin. I think it is pretty cute. I retrieved this from the local Stargate. It was one of the ones I returned back to the Stargate the following week. I hope it makes it someplace neat. This coin belongs to ocdman.

I finally got my photo setup put together. I wish I still had this coin so that I could get a clearer photo of it. I'm Sorry Bailey Dog. I think you're cute, so I'm putting this photo up anyway. I wonder what other breed specific coins are out there.

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Not a good day for Caching

We need to pick easier caches. :p SupremeMe and I set out to find a couple of tough  caches today. One had a difficulty rating of 4.5. It is dedicated to a couple of cachers with very difficult hides. The other one I believe is only rated a 3, but is named "Impossible". It also is dedicated to three cachers that have put out difficult to find Micros.  The third one we didn't find was actually a puzzle cache. We were  more or less  taking a guess on the cords, so we didn't really expect to find this one. It was hidden by one of the three in the above mentioned caches.

We did finally snag the one at the baseball field that was hidden up in the I beams above the bleachers. We also found one behind a store. All micros. Still, it remains a fun and addictive hobby. Fortunately there are thousands of caches in the Salt Lake Valley to keep me busy for a while.

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February 2008 Geocoin Club Geocoin

This is the February 2008 Geocoin Club Geocoin. Wow, what a mouthful. It is a pretty neat coin. I like the back, but since I don't know how to cover up the tracking code and still get a neat photo, I'm not going to post it. I believe I snagged this one out of the  One in, One out cache in Sandy. Whatever it was named, it was under the skirting of a light pole. :p

This particular geocoin belongs to Ad0or. The Ad0or team consists of a couple named Jacob and Helen. They are pretty avid geocachers. I believe they have over 6000 finds/hides. They really seem to enjoy hiding micros. Some of them are pretty tough. He drops a lot of them in trees, and we are getting pretty good at finding those. The down side to looking for Ad0or caches is that the cords on a couple  of them have been off by quite a bit. When I found this coin, I vowed to hang on to it until I found a micro that he had hidden in a three story parking garage. It sucked, because once we got the cords, it could have been on any of the three levels. Add to it that the cords were off a bit. It lead to three attempts on my part, and even more on my caching partners part to find it. Even then, it was only achieved  with the help of a hint from another cacher.

So if you want to find the "So, here's to you" cache, it is located on second level of the staircase. It is about the size of a large pill. It is magnetic. When you come down the second set of stairs it is up high and on the left. More or less under the top staircase, but more on the frame of the cage.

Now that I've found it, I've got to release this coin back in to the wild!

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Uckermark Geocoin

This is the Uckermark Geocoin. I didn't actually retrieve this one. A friend of mine hiked up to the snowshoe cache and found it for me. The picture doesn't do it justice. It is a really beautiful coin. This particular coin has a pretty generic goal to travel the world. It belongs to tokencollector and was released in North Carolina on Sept 12th, 2007.

I deposited it in a local stargate. So hopefully it makes an international jump some time soon. I actually dropped of 5 coins in the hope that they are moved around the world. Interesting thing these stargates. (loved the movie and the series by the way). I was under the impression that things needing to move would be marked. However, I took 5 coins and once I logged them I discovered that 4 of them have international hopes. So I'm thinking the system is flawed. Or, at the very least the box needs to be emptied more frequently so that outbound items are not picked back up by people like me. I'll be making the 30 mile drive again next week to drop off the items I apparently pinched. Incidentally, I also dropped off that California Poppy. The Stargate (assuming it works) will get the swag closer to its goal than my dad can.

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Unite for Diabetes Travel Bug

This is another one that is close enough for me. I think that if it had someplace big enough for it to actually hold a legible number they would have slapped it on there and called it a  geocoin.  The goal of this coin is to spread awareness of Diabetes.

I picked it up in a rather unusual cache. There are tons of caches hanging in trees. There are plenty of ammo boxes  stuffed under  bushes along trails, here in Utah there are even quite a few hidden at the base of lamp posts. However, you don't just find a lot of caches in the middle of a parking garage. It wasn't even a micro. (Yipee) It was discovered in a pill bottle that had been wedged in a gap in the support wall. Very creative. It was all the way down by the ground and was covered with bits of dried grass. I love finding urban caches that aren't micros.

We went back a few days later to drop off another coin and someone had stuffed it in the crack about waist high,  fully exposed and empty. I think that maybe it had been muggled.

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Wood GeoCoins

This coin isn't trackable, but it was still cool to find it in the cache. I want to say it was the second coin I found for the day. I didn't take it though, I just snapped a photo. I figure with so many missing geocoins I could leave this one for someone else to find. Besides, I can keep a photo, guilt free.

This was a quick cache. We literally pulled in to the parking lot right in front of it. As soon as we got there I knew where it was. Under the box at the base of the street light. I've never seen caches hidden this way until I moved to Utah, although I don't think I've ever noticed a box around the base of a street light before. At least not one that moved. However, this seems to be the preferred hiding spot locally. Well, that and micro's in pine trees....

The first one we found like this was actually pretty funny. My cohort in crime and I wanted to be first to find. So,a t ten pm we headed out to the cords. The cords, put us dead center in the middle of an empty parking lot. THere were two strips of grass with a few sparse bushes, a light pole, and not much else. We were bickering over where it could possibly be when the sky opened up and the hail began. I didn't expect this to be a long hunt so I was underdressed for the weather. So was my friend, but it didn't stop him. I watched him wander aimlessly around the parking lot while I sat in the warm comfort of the car. As it turns out, he's a hard core cacher. Eventually the hail let up and joined him in his hunt. I think it took us about 40 minutes. Kind of hard to be discreet when hanging around an empty parking lot for that long. :p

Eventually he wandered over to another light pole. The box was loose on that one and when I saw him pick it up, the light came on and I turned and lifted the box at the base of the light right next to the car. There it was, a brand new empty tube. All that work, and we didn't even get to trade. But, hey, they can't all winners.

Now whenever we see a light box at the cords it is always the first place we look. More often than not we find the cache.

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Quilt Travel Bug

It is close enough to a geocoin for me. I thought this one was pretty cool. I snagged it out of a thermos that was buried under old leaves next to a river. Travel Bugs work a lot like geocoins. They have a trackable number but instead of being engraved on the item the number is on a tag that is attached. I'm not going to show the tag because it would be pretty uncool of me to post a trackable number for the world to see. If you want to know what they look like you will have to find one in a cache.

One of the neat things about the geocaching website is that it will tell you if a cache has any special items in them. There are icons next to the listings for coins and travel bugs. if you hold the cursor over the icon it will ell you what it is for. The sucky part, is that if someone pilfers a coin out of a cache, the site is still going to list it as being there. This tends to lead to a lot of frustration for other cachers. For example, I went looking for 8 caches today that were supposed to have coins. I came home with one coin and a travel bug. I sure thought about keeping the poppy coin, but I know I'd be riddled with guilt for the rest of my life. We're talking the Tell Tale Heart kind of guilt here people. If only everyone was as easily manipulated as I am

Back to the topic at hand. This TB is on a mission. Two quilting friends, one in Oregon and one in Australia both dropped off quilting travel bugs. The one that I found was started in Oregon and is on its way to Brisbane Australia. So, if you happen to be in the Salt Lake area and will be traveling to an international airport, like lets say, Los Angeles you can pick it up in the "Under the Radar Cache". I won't ruin the surprise, but it is actually a pretty neat hide.

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Custom geocoin

This coin is the first one I found. I know, I know, you thought the poppy was the first one I found. The poppy is the first trackable coin that I found. This one can't be tracked, so I get to keep it. I found it in the Bear Creek Bridge Cache. I didn't even have the GPS with me. I looked at the geocaching website, saw there was one in the area and commented on it when I took my kids up on a hike. It took my son all of 30 seconds to find it. He disappeared under the bridge and popped up a few seconds later with the container in his hand. My friend was with me and he was all "what's that?", and then I got to tell him all about geocaching.

I signed up to geocache a couple of years ago. In the few weeks since I found the Bear Creek Cache, my friend has surpassed me in caches found. It is an addictive hobby. Its almost become a competition between the two of us

I also need to sit down and have a chat with my son. This isn't exactly Oregon. He really needs to look before poking around under things. There are lots of snakes here in Utah. As a parent it is always fun to put enough fear in to the kids that they remember to pay attention to their surroundings, but not so much that they don't want to go.

Back to the coin. I am assuming that this is a signature item. A signature item would be something that someone buys (or makes) a lot of, so that they can leave the same thing in every cache they find. At least that is my understanding of it. So far I've found a cool wooden chess piece, some wine charms and now a geocoin that 3 costco guys had made up. I don't currently have a signature item, but I think I should. I think I need a really cool coin.

I give you: 3 costco guys:

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Micro California Poppy

THIS is the coin I found that prompted this site. I was first to find (okay second to find a muggle accidently found the cache first and signed the log book) the cache and I thought the coin was pretty cool. I soooo wanted to keep it. I logged in and discovered its goal was to get back to Florida by October of this year. Incidently, i have family in Florida. I'd be guilt ridden for all eternity if I kept it. So instead, I decided to keep a photo of it, and send it on its merry way.  You can look for it in the Florida panhandle in a week or so.

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