It's getting hard to hide a gc.com geocache

For almost a year now I've been carrying around a cache - sandwich size Lock and Lock™ with logbook and swag. I've been looking for a good spot to hide it locally. A nice forest with good trails or an attractive spot somewhere.

3 times I've tried to submit, each time I've been turned down. Once because I was about 10m too close to a 5-year-old old cache. I forgot that I had it on my ignore list because it was a bring-a-ladder cache and required some strength to retrieve the cache. I went back to try to find another good largish hiding spot not too far from the trail but I just couldn't find anything I liked.

The next attempt about a month ago was about 20m too close to a 2-year-old rock pile hide with a number of DNFs and NMs.  I found it 2 years ago. The coords are way off (I had posted better coords but the CO didn't update them). For the last 2 years people have been leaving miffed comments about the coordinates and the rock pile problems. I contacted the reviewer hoping they would intervene and alert the owner that if they didn't want to maintain the cache there was someone interested in hiding a cache nearby. But the reviewer asked me to post an NA before s/he would proceed. In my experience active but slack owners do not take kindly to NAs. 

This week I couldn't believe how fortunate I was to find a new section of a local trail. Freshly blazed and no caches. I found a decent spot under a stump. Submitted the cache. Waited and 3 days later I get a friendly but disheartening email from the reviewer. Someone has put placeholders on this new trail. I may not be able to post my cache. He will contact the placeholder. I must wait for a remote chance that the spot may open up. Sigh.

This has never happened to me before. We've been planting/posting caches on geocaching.com since 2002 (over 40 cache hides) and have never been stymied. 

The cache also contains a Munzee. I could undeploy and redeploy elsewhere but this is the 3rd time I've undeployed and redeployed it. So yesterday I decided I would post the cache anyway, on Garmin's OpenCaching site. This is a huge leap for me.  I considered posting on opencaching.us too but they discourage cross-posting.  I'll see how the Garmin site goes. I don't expect many visits maybe a couple if the Munzeers are also cachers who don't care which site a cache is posted on. If I get lucky and the placeholder relinquishes the location I'll also have it posted on gc.com but for now it's my first cache listing on another cache site.
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Update:
 "I must wait for a remote chance that the spot may open up. Sigh."
The trail opened up! I ended up planting 2 along the trail and have received some very favourable comments. :)

I tried submitting the cache to opencaching.com but I think because this was my first posted cache on OC, my submission was scrutinized carefully and the reviewer thought my coordinates were off. They are fine. I used a Garmin 62s to get the lat/long and averaged until I got a 100% rating. I decided not to post it on OC.com.

I went back to the first forest where I was too close to an old 5 year old cache. I was going to plant a letterbox in that spot but only post it on AQ. Well I couldn't find the log. Too much vegetation covering the area in the springtime. I looked for another spot and found a decent hollow base of a tree. Sometimes visiting at different times of the year gives one a fresh perspective. And, it turns out this spot is far enough away from any geocache in that forest. It's been 5 years since the 2 older caches were placed so it'll give people who visited years ago another reason to go treasure hunting in this quiet old-growth forest.

Funny comment on our Letterbox Hybrid

I was re-reading some of the logs on one of our letterbox hybrids and had a good laugh at one of last year's comments:

iHazFail99
10/10/2011
Me and my friend decided to go find it letterbox style. We were wondering where it was till we realized it was the trail we go through every day! We found it, and I told him to hold the lid for me. Turns out, there wastext on the lid and it freaked my friend out sooooooooo bad cause he never went letterboxing before and didn't know what to expect.It was aloud the lines of "You found a LETTERBOX. Letterbox is a sickness. If there is ink on your hands, it is too late. There was ink on his hands,and he freaked. I decided to have some fun with him and made him dunk his hands in the river. I then told him it was fake and we laughed.

On the inside of the lid I taped this message:

You have found a LETTERBOX.
Letterboxing is a sickness.
If you don't already have this affliction,
close this box immediately and put it back where you found it, well hidden.
Wash hands immediately after use.
If fingers are inky prior to box usage, it's already too late.
Seek another letterbox immediately.

Geoswag in 2002

Crappy Swag, Stolen Geocoins, and the Micro Spew

An interesting article about the history of geoswag.

Deployed successfully

I've deployed a few munzees lately, with good results. Looks like the overloaded server is chugging along well enough now that the Easter frenzy is over. I was worried that there would be no more deploying until the site was moved to its own server. So far so good. :)

Munzee crashed

The  Munzee site crashed. On Easter weekend. Probably because the special easter egg munzees are a big hit and everyone is going out collecting their extra points.

The site owners have announced that the server has fried and they need to upgrade to bigger and better servers, which could take a month.

Geez, the writing was on the wall. There were several server problems in the last month. The game is growing exponentially. Too bad they couldn't take action in anticipation of the growth and the huge increase in activity on a Special Munzee weekend. They create special extra-point munzees to increase play yet aren't ready to deal with the increased play.

The problem with Munzee - the servers go down so does the game. It can't be played offline. When the servers are down you can't capture, you can't deploy you can edit deployed munzees. You can't do anything. With geocaching, as long as you have downloaded geocache gpx files to your gps you can play. You can go hunt geocaches. Later when the site is back up you can log your finds and add comments. Same for letterboxing. Print off or save the letterboxing clues and you're good to go. The letterboxing Atlas Quest site just about never goes down. I don't recall there ever being a problem. The webmaster even encourages people to try to break the server on Plant a Letterbox day.

I think I'm going to take a break from Munzeeing (although I had this great trail and some creative munzees I wanted deploy today -- maybe I'll wait until mid-May and see if Munzee has the kinks worked out).

Disheartened

Most of my munzees are laminated colour copies of paintings that relate to where they are located - for example, my cemetery munzees have cemetery scenes. My forest munzees have paintings depicting forest themes. I've deployed 36. Got 18 captures. I thought people might enjoy the creativity. Of the 9 comments I've got so far not one person has said anything about the art theme.  Maybe people just want a simple game - capture the qr code get 5 points.