Working on my first caches!

I'm officially working on my first caches!  My plan is to spend the next few weeks putting them together, and then having them ready to submit by mid October.  My birthday is on October 17th and I'm taking a few days off that week, with nothing planned but Geocaching.  I figure it'll be as good a time as any to get my caches out into the wild.

I've been on the Geocaching subreddit a lot these days, and a common discussion has been about the frustration people feel when new cachers flood an area with simple, uninspired caches.  I have to admit that my original ideas for caches when I first started out in July are significantly different than what I'm working on now.  I'm up to over 80 caches found so far, and each one has given me ideas to use on my own.

Without any spoilers, I can let you in on a few things.  I'm working on three caches, two of which are based on Video Game History.  I built an arcade machine a few years back that played every arcade, Nintendo, Atari, Commodore 64, Intellivision, Vectrex, Sega, Neo-Geo, etc... game ever made.  I'm using the theme of a particular game for each cache, and the container and/or location will reflect that theme. I have been ruminating on this for a while, and have come up with decent ideas for:

• Asteroids
• Battlezone
• Breakout
• BurgerTime
• Centipede
• Dig Dug
• Dragon's Lair
• Donkey Kong
• Frogger
• Galaxian / Galaga
• Joust
• Minecraft
• Moon Patrol
• Pac Man / Ms. Pac Man
• Paperboy
• Plants vs. Zombies
• Pole Position
• Q*Bert
• River Raid
• Space Invaders
• Spy Hunter
• Tapper
• Zaxxon
• Zork

I can probably come up with even more than that, but this gives me plenty to start with.  The neat thing about these is that none of them are a nano, magnetic keyholder, bison tube, or lock and lock container.  At least not standard models of them.  I have a heavily modified bison tube in the works that will look nothing like a bison tube when it's done.

The first two that I'll have ready are Breakout and Frogger.  I'm also actively working on Pac-Man, Joust, and Plants vs. Zombies, but I'm not planning on them going out for a few months at least.

The best part of this is that I live right down the street from a park that's begging for caches.  There is one cache there now (View of the Lake, which was the first one I ever found), and room for at least two more.  I've been scouting spots and have a good idea of where I'll place them, and once I'm sure I'll spend a few days getting good averaged coordinates from my Garmin.

I also have a third cache in the works that's unrelated to the Video Game theme - it's an idea that my wife came up with, and I'm running with it.  We'll see how that one turns out.

All in all, it's an exciting time for me these days.  I have a little work area set up to create the caches, and it's a bit of a mess, with paint and other stuff cluttering things up a bit.

Before I forget  - here's a neat tip.  I'm making a custom container for one of the caches, and needed a way to seal up the container.  I ended up going online and buying some piggy bank stoppers.  They are soft and flexible enough to make a really good seal against the elements, and were really cheap.