Sunday, August 19, 2012

Post vacation wrap up - NJ Shore

It's been a busy week!  I went after 30 caches in three states, and found 22 of them. First things first - the Garmin is great!  I have learned a ton about it in the past week, and will be posting some tutorials at some point.

I have the eTrex 20, which is the middle model in the current eTrex line.  The eTrex 10 has a black and white screen, the eTrex 20 has color, and the eTrex 30 has a magnetic compass built in and the ability to interact with the Garmin Chirp beacons.  All three support paperless Geocaching, and can also receive signals from GLONASS (Russian GPS satellite system).  From what I've noticed, GLONASS isn't affecting the GPS accuracy as much as it is improving the GPS time to acquire a signal.  My car's TomTom can take a minute or more to acquire a GPS signal, but my Garmin is usually up and connected by the time it's done starting up, which is about 20 seconds.  Freaking sweet!

Caching at the shore

All told, I went after 14 caches in Cape May Court House, Wildwood, and Cape May.  I logged 3 DNFs and one "Needs Maintenance", and I also found my first three trackables!  One Travel Bug, one Geocoin, and a copy of a Geocoin that was left in a cache with a note to just log it as "discovered".

Wildwood shot I took in 2010. Kite Aerial Photography is another hobby of mine.
That's me holding the kite line in the lower right of the picture. 
An interesting thing about caches in this area was that Cape May County, New Jersey has an official series of caches called CMCST, which is the Cape May County Sites Tour.  Each of these caches is placed in an area that's either a good spot for sightseeing, local tourist interest (the Cape May County Zoo had one), or of historical interest (a WWII bunker on the beach in Cape May).  Very cool.

Wildwood had two of my favorite caches, and one of my DNFs was at a great location.  The Captain Was Here... well, I'm not going to spoil it, but if you do the street view thing on Google Maps with the coordinates from the cache description, you'll see where it was.  Very, very neat.  I grew up in South Jersey and spent a lot of time at the shore growing up, and had driven by this spot quite a few times.  This was the first time I actually got out checked it out.

Wild Thing - Holy crap this was neat, but hard.  The cache itself is nothing fancy, but it's in a major landmark and is constantly surrounded by people taking pictures.  I'm 6'8" tall and don't exactly blend into the background, so it was nerve wracking (but fun, in its own way) to try to be stealthy enough to pick it up.  Luckily (?) the weather was starting to turn, so when the crowd thinned out I made the grab.

The Ships Will Find Their Way! II - This was one of my DNFs, but later logs show that the cache had gone missing and I wasn't just losing my mind trying to find it.  This was located at the Hereford Inlet Lighthouse, which I didn't even know existed. Beautiful gardens, and there is a museum tour that I now will definitely check out when we visit the area again in 2013.

Wikimedia Commons image shown.
Another one notable for it's location was The Stinton Family Lighthouse Cache. This was one of two caches placed near the Cape May Lighthouse.  This is also where I picked up the Geocoin.

Wikimedia Commons image shown.
All in all I saw a ton of different types of caches, and most of them were in very cool locations.  The cache locations all seem to fall into a few categories:

  • Beautiful location
  • Interesting / historical location
  • Good hiding spot, but not much else going for it
  • Totally random spot, placed on a whim, or possibly while intoxicated
Luckily, most of them fell within the first two categories, but I saw a few of the other ones as well.  Now that I've been doing this for a few weeks I'm getting a better idea about what I want to do when I create my own caches.  I'd like to strike a balance between location and interesting cache container.

I spent the rest of the week picking up caches back home in PA, and then swung down to Delaware to get my first two in that state, and the badge to go along with it.  I picked up quite a few in Rose Tree Park, which is pretty local, and another spot where I've done a little Kite Aerial Photography.

Kite photo I took in Rose Tree Park in 2011. That's me again.
This was honestly the first place where I've been that took me "into the woods" so to speak.  All of my caches to date were in very public areas, but most of the ones here were down trails in the woods.  I have to say, I found the experience terrific and can't wait to find more local caches that are off the beaten path.

Saw this hollow tree.  I could stand up in it comfortably (except for the spiders).
While I have been getting more interested in caching (obsessed?), I think I have reached the limit with Emily and Jack.  Emily doesn't mind caches if they are part of what we're doing, but gets frustrated if I want to "pick up a cache on the way", which I have to admit I've been doing quite often this week.  Jack likes caching, but gets totally pissed off if he isn't the one who finds it. It's no good pretending to play dumb and act like I don't know where it is - I have spent his whole life messing with his head, so he's on to me, ha ha. 

In truth, Emily is right - I have to be able to strike a balance between having fun on my own, trying to have fun as a family, and driving the two of them nuts.  Seeing as vacation is over and we're all back to the daily grind, I don't think this will be much of an issue, but I will keep it in the back of my mind as I cache.

One final note - I picked up a few souvenir badges for my profile this week - Delaware State and Second International Geocaching Day. 

Trackables mentioned in this post:
Caches picked up on vacation:

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