Kissing Munzees

Kissing in Marden
6 kissing-theme munzees were planted on the Kissing Bridge Trailway yesterday.  I'm hoping that people will like them enough to leave comments.

Geocache ownership is more satisfying then Munzee ownership

I planted a few munzees and geocaches lately.

Here are comments received on 3 new caches placed this week:

The captured munzees I placed in the same area - no comments. Which suggests to me that munzees are generally not exciting for finders. Geocaching is the meal, Munzee is the popcorn snack.  It seems that it's easier to comment on the quality and flavour of the steak but tedious to write something about each piece of popcorn kernel consumed.  
 

Munzee generators that make munzeeing easier and more fun

Two generous munzeers, DFX and thejoker have created databases that make munzeeing more fun.

Munzee GPX file generator
DFX has created a database that will generate a GPX file, a Google Maps preview or a Garmin POI (GPI) file. You can exclude your own munzees and your captured munzees. You can include special munzees and mark them as special. I love this database. I can save my iphone for capturing, saves battery life plus my GPS is so much more accurate.

Today I went out for some munzeeing and completely forgot to check my cell phone for battery life. It was down to 40%. So I shut it down and used my GPS. When I got to ground zero I used the cell phone to capture and to leave a comment then shut it down again. Walked a  couple of kilometers and captured 4 munzees and still had some power left in the cell phone.

Munzee Skin Generator
Thejoker has created a database that generates a skin from an image of your choice. You incorporate your munzee QR code by pointing to the undeployed section of your user page. Click generate and you get a cool munzee to deploy. I created the one below using the generator and an image of aged wood.

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.

Geocaching with Lincoln video

One of my favourite How To Geocache videos, starring Lincoln the cute kid: