Welcome

Welcome to the inaugural edition of the Lost Signal? Batteries drained? blog.  As you might guess, my wife, Wendi, and I are avid geocachers.  We have been signed up as members since 2008 at Geocaching.com, but really didn't get hooked hard until this year.  Some close friends of ours actually got us started.  Thanks Chris and Tina.  At the time, Wendi was working at the local swag shop (Target), and I had every other weekend to spend doing something.  So I started going caching with Chris when she worked and just loved it.  Being out of the house, doing something, was the initial attraction to the great sport.  But the excitement when finding that hidden treasure that someone placed really reels you in. 

For those of you who do not know what geocaching is, think of it as a modern day treasure hunt.  Basically, some nerd decided to hide a box in the middle of the woods when the US government opened up the GPS Satellite systems up for consumer use so that his friends could go find it.  He only gave them the longitude and latitude coordinates of where he hid it.  After they found it, they decided to hide something and almost 10 years later, you have 960,000 caches (the treasure chest) hidden around the world being hunted by out 60,000 active geocachers.

Today, when a geocacher finds a cache, they will sign a log that is left in the container to prove they were there.  They also may trade swag items (little trinkets, figures, games, CDs, necklaces, etc) that they have brought with them with something someone else left in the geocache.  Not all geocaches contain swag, especially since they vary from the size of the tip of you pinky finger to the size of an oil drum or larger!

If you want to find out more about it, message me and I would be more than happy to discuss it with you or you can visit the Geocaching.com link at the bottom of this blog.

Anyways, as I was saying, we have been geocaching since 2008.  Just a few weeks ago (Novemeber 29), we found our 1000th geocache.  It was a milestone that when we started I thought would be years away.  However, after several thousand miles later on both the Tribute and the F150, we made it.  Our first thousand definitely gave us many adventures, both in the city and out in the middle of no man's land.  I think we heard more than our share of banjos playing too. 

One of the most memorable things we did in our first 1000 was to complete a special challenge cache called the Indiana Epic 92.  To complete this challenge cache, we had to find a single geocache in each of the 92 counties.  Well, this was the reason for most of those miles.  We have seen parts of Indiana that neither one of us knew existed.  We also had a lot of fun doing it. 

The other thing about geocaching is that there is no quick trips anywhere after you get hooked.  Our normal 3 hour drive to either of our parents have taken us as long as 8 hours to complete, just because we had to stop at about 10 cemeteries, a Masonic lodge, and a few bridges along the way.  We have even taken Geo-Vacations.  We went to the GeoBash 2009 in Wauseon, OH.  This was an event for geocachers to get together and share stories, eat, drink (if they were old enough), and just have a fun time.  Oh, we also geocached while we were there.  When I decided to go to Orlando, FL, for a Visual Studio Developers conference, we decided it was a great opportunity to grab a few caches in more states.  So that trip we grabbed caches in Tennesse, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and North Carolina.  We already had grabbed a few in Kentucky when we were grabbing the southern counties in Indiana.  We have also found caches in Michigan and Illinois in other trips.

Well, that is about enough for my first blog.  Just remember if you have lost signal or your batteries are drained, maybe you need to push the power button and plug it in to recharge.