A while back I posted on Facebook asking what mistakes geocachers have made. Here are some of the answers!
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Transcript
[00:00:00] There’s a world of geocaches right out your door. Come on now, let’s go explore.
Hey everybody, Amie Shadowdragn1 here. Welcome to Mini Adventures. For those of you new to Mini Adventures, this is a miniature episode where I talk about something Geocache related. That is just not long enough for a long format interview. It can be anything from a geocaching challenge, to highlighting a geocache, to stuff I [00:01:00] found on the internet.
So for this first mini adventure, I decided to look at geocaching mistakes people have made. A while back, I posted on Facebook the question, What are some mistakes that you’ve made? And the answers are pretty interesting.
So, Scott says, Get to ground zero, find the container, don’t have tool of the trade to retrieve container, did not read the cache page before walking to ground zero to know that I needed one. That is actually a mistake that gets made a lot. We forget to read the cache page, and it can often give you a lot of good information, Such as where to park or that you need a special tool to trade.
This one says, uh, leave with the letterbox stamp and realize when I return home from vacation 900 kilometers [00:02:00] away and writing a confessing message to the owner asking for his postal address. Ah, that one hurts. That one hurts. Forgetting to save list for offline use. That’s a big issue if you end up in an area with no signal.
Forgetting to look up. Forgetting to look up. Sometimes the cache is above you. Leslie here says, I went to get a cache from inside a pole and knocked it off balance and it fell to the bottom with no way to get it out. I PM the cache owner and of course apologize profusely. Have you ever done anything like that?
This one, this is a major one. Losing car keys. Can you imagine being in the woods, geocaching, or really a park or any place outdoors and losing your car keys? I think the car keys are maybe the most important geocaching tool.[00:03:00]
This one here from Dale says, I was going after a cache, and the sloped ground was quite wet between me and ground zero. I tried to go in slow, but slipped in the mud and slid all the way to the cache. I got up and opened the cache, only to find I signed it months ago, and forgot to log the fine. Don’t make the mistake of not logging the easy ones right away anymore.
Have you ever forgotten you logged a cache and went back to find one? Thank you. Natasha says, I didn’t turn my location finder on my phone on, so I just wandered to a place on the map and tried to find the hedge that looked right on the other finder’s photos. Yeah, I think I’ve done something similar before.
It happens. Especially, you know, you starting out early. You don’t know what you’re doing. Melissa wrote, no hate please, lol. But we got home from a [00:04:00] day of caching from out of town and discovered we had put a bison tube in our bag of supplies. The log didn’t have the cache information and we weren’t able to put it back.
Ouch, did you ever accidentally take a container home? Oh. Not setting a waypoint for the car. That’s, that’s a really good reminder, especially if you’re out in the woods. Following GPS. Following Google map directions without further investigation, I refused to climb fences. Oh, guessing Google took him to a fence.
Dropped the bison container and it fell into the water.
Going to the fake coordinates of a puzzle cache even after having solved the puzzle, I did that once. I did that once, I pulled up, I put the wrong coordinates in, I searched all over the place, realized I did it wrong. That, that’s a rough one when you do that. Making an assumption on what the hide [00:05:00] will be, a couple people said that one.
Yeah, I’ve done that too. You completely throw you off and you don’t even find the correct container because you’re assuming it’s something else.
Uh, not checking before they drove to see if people had logged DNF on an easy find. Uh, yeah, if you have to drive a long way to get there, that sucks. Uh, that’s a good tip for if you’re caching with kids, too. Check to see if there’s DNFs on it, or if it’s been found recently. This one’s interesting. Maya says, Did a loop backwards and ended up scaling down a cliff, walking through rattlesnake territory, adding two miles to the hike when I could have read the description and just driven around.
It was beautiful though. You gotta read that cache description. Such an easy mistake so many of us make. A lot of people put things like, Forgetting to take your pen, and not wearing proper clothing or shoes. [00:06:00] Uh, a lot of people made comments about stinging insects. Tyler wrote, forgetting that wasp will love to make nest under light pole skirts.
Big nest. Guess he had an encounter with some wasp. Yeah, watch out for those stinging insects for sure. Finding all the local caches, leaving nothing for souvenir days or for trying to streak. Yeah, that’s a good point, especially if it’s bad weather out and you want to go get something. Yeah. Anna wrote, when we first went geocaching, we searched for over half an hour for a container, only to discover it was an earth cache.
Mmm. Yeah, knowing your cache type would be, would be good. That hurts. Oh, gosh.
Fell down a hill and tore my Achilles tendon, had to have surgery. That’s just very unfortunate. I can’t, can’t say that’s a mistake. That really sucks though.[00:07:00]
This one is funny and cringey at the same time. Let my son play and destroy with a rock he found, only to find out later that was actually hiding the cash. Whoops! Can laugh about that now, but oh my gosh, cringey. Put a wet log in the container when they should have replaced it. Didn’t know better at the time, know now.
Yeah. Yeah. We, we all make mistakes when we first start caching, especially. Placing caches in a floodplain untethered. I would go further and say if you’re going to place them in a floodplain, put them up high. Definitely put them up high. Putting too big a swag in a small container. It was stuck on top of the logbook.
Did not have tools to get it out. Had to message the CO. Yeah, these are all real simple mistakes that any of us can make. Some of them are funny, some of them are [00:08:00] cringy. What mistakes did you make when you started geocaching, or what mistakes have you made recently as a seasoned cacher? Uh, reach out at geocache.
adventures. podcast at gmail. com or on the Facebook page. Send me a message, let me know what mistakes you’ve made. And if you’re interested in having some of your answers to questions possibly showing up in future episodes, make sure you follow the Geocache Adventures Facebook page and the group where I occasionally post questions.
So happy caching everybody. Thanks for listening.
[00:09:00]
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