What a great weekend! On Saturday, Amy and I threw our first party in our new house. It was supposed to be a BBQ, complete with an outdoor fire and horseshoes, but the cold and rain forced it indoors. We still had about 20 people show up though and had lots of fun with music, Cranium, darts, video games, and great food! Since I turn 25 on Tuesday - Yes, I’m almost a quarter of a century old! - Amy made me an ice cream cake and everybody sang happy birthday. The fun part is that most of our friends are international students from the Chemical Engineering program at USC, so besides English, I also got to hear “Happy Birthday” in Spanish, German, Chinese and Greek.

Then, after church on Sunday, I decided to go geocaching and check out Harbison State Forest for the first time. I saved a couple geoacache coordinates into my gps, packed some water, my ipod shuffle, and a map of the park into my backpack, tossed my rusty old bike in the back of my truck and took off.

I didn’t really have a plan as to exactly where I was going in the forest, but as you can see from the map above, I ended up making a pretty good circle of the Southeast side of the park. The full ride took me about 3 hours and I found the following 2 geocaches:

• Vernal Pond - This was a pretty easy-to-find ammo can located just north of the Education Center office. While I was there, I picked up a travel bug. Travel bugs are trackable dog tags, usually attached to an item that moves from geocache to geocache as people find it and rehide it. This particular travel bug was attached to a posable Sully figure. He was first hidden in Ohio in November of 2001. When I logged my find, I posted this picture of him to verify that he’s still in good shape…and that the geocache was really easy. I’ll take him with me next time I go caching and hide him in the first cache that’s big enough for him to fit in.

• Melvin - The second cache I went after wasn’t quite as easy. To get there, I decided to follow the Midlands Mountain trail, which is rated “Difficult to Moderately Difficult”, but WHAT A FUN RIDE! Up hill, down hill, sharp turns, and lots of MUD! On the Northeast corner of the trail was a lookout point called Harbison Bluffs, with a steep slope down to the Broad River. My GPS unit said that Melvin was located straight ahead. So, I left my bike at the top of the hill and half-hiked, half-slid down to the bottom. Upon my arrival at the river, I realized that the cache was about half way back UP the slope. I finally found the ammo box tucked under a fallen tree and covered with limbs. It wasn’t until I opened it up and looked at the log book till I realized the cache hadn’t been found since JULY! I usually don’t go after caches that haven’t been found within the last few months becuase there’s a high probability that it might be missing. I never did check the date on this one apparently, but I’m glad I didn’t.

I arrived home by about 6, out of water, covered in mud, and seriously thinking about purchasing an annual biking permit for the state forest.

After a long period geocaching quiescence, I’ve been re-inspired to get out there and start caching again. Last night I attended the Geoholics First Anniversary Meeting and met some people who were new to geocaching, some (like myself) who had recently become addicted, and quite a few “hardcore veterans”. So what does the average geocacher look like? You tell me. We were quite a diverse group.

While there, I heard stories of tricky caches, creative containers, and lucky finds. There are quite a few geocaches hidden in the area around where Ames and I live, and I just picked up a bike mount on eBay for my GPSr, so I’m looking forward to getting back out there and using multi-billion dollar military satellites to find Tupperware hidden in the woods…

I've been doing my geocaching the old fashioned way. I login to geocaching.com, search for the zip code I want to cache in, browse through the results, printing out the ones I want to go find, and manually key those coordinates into my Magellan SportTrack Map. This unit actually comes with an uplink cable to download cache info straight to the receiver, but I've never used it. For a tech-savvy person, sitting and keying in GPS data, knowing that there is a better way is frustrating.

It's time for a change. I downloaded the highly acclaimed EasyGPS program to transfer waypoints to my GPSr, which will probably cut my Geocaching prep time by about half. That's a decent improvement - But Wait, there's MORE!... I also found an open source command line program called GeoToad that actually queries all the info from geocaching.com without ever having to visit the website:

GeoToad lets you perform on-demand queries against the Geocaching website, and export the matching geocaches to numerous devices and over 20 file formats. You tell it what you want to see, such as:

Geocaches that I have not found within 15 miles of 27513 with travelbugs.

or if you are a little more demanding, something like:

Geocaches in Texas with a difficulty of 3 or higher that have never been found, match the keywords river, or stream, but not any caches owned by Elvis.

You can then take these query results with you on a nice long print-out, import them into EasyGPS, transfer them to your GPS unit, or even save the results onto your cellphone!

GREAT! ...but I don't like the amount of delay time they specified between grabbing cache information. No Problem! The source code is on the same website and it's written in Ruby. So, I downloaded a Ruby editor, popped open geotoad.rb and changed the "Sleep" value (line 406) to a much lower value than 15, and BINGO!

NOTE: Although you can set this value to 0 (and I did for fun) this is not such a good idea for getting say, all the caches in Florida. It's fun to watch it go, but I'm sure it puts a major strain on the Geocaching servers - especially if there are a lot of people out there using GeoToad.

Last July, I bought a GPS receiver so that I could make Amy “hunt” for a present that I bought her and so we could try out geocaching on our anniversary trip to St. Augustine. We haven’t been out much looking for cache’s, but the time we have spent has been a lot of fun. About 6 months ago, I decided to hide my first (and only) geocache in the courtyard outside the office where I work. The cache is called Runningman’s Jungle and is a slightly tricky cache to find because of the amount of traffic during the day, and the open cement roof tends to obstruct the GPS signal.

Since then, my coworkers and I have had quite a bit of fun watching people wandering stealthfully around the complex, trying to find the cache. To add to the fun, I setup a webcam that points to the area where the cache is hidden. Using a program called Active Webcam, I was able to have the cam take snapshots on motion detection rather than just sending them to the website. The problem with the motion detection system is that it tends to either be too sensitive and save an unmanageable amount of snapshots, or too oblivious to movement that it misses when people are near the cache. For that reason, I have long since turned off the motion detection system. While I had it on though, I caught some of Gainesville’s most prolific cachers, and thought I’d finally post them up.

Suemac was the first to find the cache. She was here during the day with her daughter, so I actually got to meet her in person. I’ve since learned that she’s not very nice when it comes to hiding micro caches.
They’re always so hard to find!

Esco, getting closer…

SwampKing, just about to jump the wall to get to the cache.
According to the logs, he was here with SwampQueen.

Today marks Amy and I's one year anniversary! TO celebrate, we left last Friday and went to St. Augustine for a romantic weekend of historic tours, fine dining, and Geocaching! For lots of fun pictures go to amesnjas.com, click on the polaroid button at the bottom, then 1st Anniversary Vacation.