Reflections on the Geolympix

Alas, the Geolympix is over (but the Olympics are in full swing!) but wow, what an amazing event. A huge congratulations and thanks to all the planners who made this event such a success. I managed to achieve quite a few self-set targets including the 11 icons in 11 hours challenge! Woooooooooo-hoooooooooooooooo! Cheesescones and I only started to doubt we would do it when we thought our Wherigo-compatible device was going to fail on us, but no, with CarSim97 too, we did it! Also managed to colour in Northamptonshire on our counties map, get the oldest cache in England and buy a super-cool T-shirt and all 10 PuzTox (will write a separate entry on these). Over the weekend I attended a total of 5 events and if I'd been able to stick around longer, I'd have done more. Shame we couldn't do the "marathon" rings, but Coombe Hill was such an awesome target for Monday, I'm glad we had the weather for it too. To cap it all off, I even bagged a challenge cache on the way home. Thanks mellers! Wouldn't have known about it otherwise!

Here are some photo highlights of my Geolympix weekend:

The Flash-Mob event attendees bright and early at 8am on Sunday morning - most are probably here for the 11 in 11 challenge, getting both the event and webcam icons. The locals gave us some pretty odd looks!

This has to be the best Virtual I've ever done!

The hard-to-track down roaming Cuckoo Cache, logged at last!

I have long needed this T-shirt!

Last year I met Jeremy and this year I met Bryan. Just one founder left...

My oldest cache yet, beating First in Wales by a month: View From Coombe Hill in Buckinghamshire

Another challenge in the bag: AJ's Caching Challenge

Geocaching Trinkets

Geocaching started out simple - a container was hidden in a public area and contained a log book and perhaps some items to trade, nothing really of any value, just stuff to fill the container.

Now, however, you find a decent-sized cache and you may well find more than just a log book and McDonald's Happy Meal toys and Christmas cracker gifts. Consider below the different items which can be found in any geocaches big enough to hold them:

TOP RIGHT: Geocoin - not legal tender in any country, geocoins are designed by geocachers and then minted courtesy of certain websites which specialise in making them. They don't have to be round either - geocoins come in all shapes and sizes now but generally they are metal and engraved in some way. Every single geocoin has a unique six-digit trackable code so if you find one in a cache you can log it on the geocaching.com website. Geocoins are to be moved between caches and must not be kept by the finder unless they have the permission of the coin owner. Some people collect geocoins. I myself have a small collection, and eBay will show you various designs. Because they are often quite beautiful and creative, some people do not want to part with their coins and do not put them in caches, but often they are happy for other cachers to "discover" them in their collection.

TOP MIDDLE: Travel Bug or TB - Travel Bugs have a similar function to geocoins in that they each carry a unique six-digit trackable code which when entered into the geocaching.com website brings up details about the bug in question. These are not collectable in the same way that coins are though and tend to be attached to small items which have a mission, for example a TB may be attached to toy aeroplane which wants to visit caches near airports. As with geocoins, these are not to be kept by the finder but moved on to another cache. The TB's mission can normally be ascertained from the trackable's page, but sometimes it will have it written on it. Travel Bugs have now branched out so that they make almost anything trackable, for example T-shirts, car stickers and even tattoos.

TOP RIGHT: Trackable tags - Almost identical to Travel Bugs, these tend to be metal tags which have a picture on one side and a six-digit trackable code on the other. Not to be kept by the finder but moved on to another cache.

BOTTOM LEFT: PuzTox - A PuzTok is a fairly new creation so you might not have seen any in a cache yet. There are ten to collect in total and they were created for the 2012 Oxford Geolympix. Using the reverse of a PuzTok you can create and solve certain puzzle caches. They are not trackable.

BOTTOM MIDDLE: Pathtags - not a common find in caches in the UK, these have a much greater prominence in America. They are loggable like geocoins and TBs but not on the geocaching.com website. In fact their connection to geocaching is artificial; caches just make convenient places to trade them. Pathtags.com allows you to design and create your own tags, and to log others you have found. They can be bought but it is common practice to swap them much like you would trading cards.

BOTTOM RIGHT: Signature items - in this case a wooden token. A signature item can be anything which resembles a particular cacher. Mine have mushrooms on them and my caching name, "thebuttonmushroom" on the reverse. Some people leave calling cards, others have created their own unique signature items such as bottle caps. They are not trackable.

Training for the Olympix

Well, maybe not training so much as eagerly anticipating it! I don't know about you, but this will be my only Mega this year, even though the UK is playing host to not one, not two but THREE Megas this year. Very exciting time for loads of us cachers who love public gatherings on a grand scale. I've only been to one Mega before, last year's Mega Wales in my old home of Swansea, but practically I can only get to Oxford out of the three Megas this year, which is fine because that's the one that excites me the most. You may be aware that the committee behind the Geolympix is also hoping to turn this from a Mega Event into a new type altogether, a travelling competitive event which will be hosted by a different country each time, much like the real Olympics. Groundspeak lackeys will be at the Geolympix and will assess whether this idea is feasible. I'm very hopeful - imagine being part of the first ever Geolympix?

With so much going on at the Geolympix, there just won't be time to do everything, which is a real shame. I'd love the do the huge circuits that will be up, but I won't have the time or the energy on the day (maybe I'll come back to them in time) and something tells me the weather won't be in our favour. Who knows; maybe it'll have picked up by then but this summer has been a total washout so far. So depressing!

Anyway, I am going to attempt this 11 icons in 11 hours thing. I hope it works. If it does I'll have to go back to BadgeGen and update my profile with new Earthcache, Wherigo, Mega, CITO, Webcam and Event badges! I'm looking forward to attending my first ever Flash Mob event (why are these not a type of their own?) I also hope to discover literally hundreds more geocoins and TBs. Not sure how to record the codes yet. I've been in the habit of scribbling down the numbers on bits of paper but that is time-consuming and leads to errors. Photograph them maybe? I like it best when owners of vast numbers of geocoins print off their codes on little paper lists so that admirers can just keep a piece of paper. If you are going to Geolympix this year and are bringing your trackables collection, please do this: I want to log your coins and bugs! I think for the first time I will bring along my small collection of coins (about a dozen or so plus two pathtags who people who log them) and I might make some trackables to leave up there. I will be brining my Geocaching Licence and my personal trackable dog tags. Hope to be able to log that elusive Cuckoo Cache too! Aah, I can't wait! Oh, and I will be buying Bronze, Silver and Gold geocoins!

UK Cache Mag review

Before I start, let me make it clear that my views are mine alone, and as a blog entry, this is little more than a subjective review from one member of the intended audience. Your views may be different, and that's great. It just means you'll have to get a copy of UK Cache Mag to find out!

Well I was not expecting to see this brought out, to be totally honest, but I was delighted when I saw a new publication, devoted entirely to geocaching, in the newsletter of ukgeocachers.co.uk. To my knowledge this is the first proper published, tangible, geocaching magazine designed for the British reader. As you may know, I am a loyal fan to FTF Geocacher magazine which was quite possibly the first serious geocaching publication in the world. I don't miss issues of FTF Geocacher and whilst I always love reading it, it's a little too American at times. This isn't a criticism of the magazine; it's meant for an American audience so of course it's going to be American in style and content, but sometimes it's just nice to read something British.

So yes, I found this magazine pretty good, although sadly not exceptional. It relies heavily on cacher-submitted content, which is good. If one person were to write an entire magazine it would probably be a little dull, if not entirely biased towards whatever the publisher wanted to read. I don't care much for the GSAK Q&A section, having never really clicked with GSAK, but I can see that that would be a total delight to many geocachers, perhaps newbies who are just starting to discover their stats and how wide-ranging they are! GSAK is the perfect tool for organising all those stats, but it's a monster of a program to get used to.

So yes, before I lead off on a GSAK tangent... a few of the articles really grabbed my attention, particularly the one about how frustrating it is to go to great lengths to hide a cache only to have "TFTC" as a log. I wholly agree that all we cachers should be trying to think of interesting things to say in our logs, and we cache owners need to make sure that our hides are worthy of such logs! Good food for thought in that article.

Sadly what spoiled it totally for me, and this will probably not bother that many people (I am a little pedantic about this - ask my friends and colleagues!), is the atrocious spelling, grammar and punctuation mistakes on almost every single page. For the record, you do not put apostrophes in straight forward plurals. You do not put an apostrophe in "its" unless it's short for "it is" or "it has". Other errors of a similar nature include the unnecessary over-use of hyphenation when words are at the end of a line, and the simple fact that there appears to have been no proof-reading prior to publication. The word "content" without a "c" (?) got in there and on more than one occasion the sentence never actually appeared to have an end, seemingly cut off at the bottom of the page.

These errors are pedantic, I know, but I feel that if you're going to publish something on a grand scale it needs to be thoroughly checked over before it hits the shops. Thankfully errors like this are so very easily corrected that future issues may be damn-near perfect! As for the content, I didn't find it gripping, but there was enough in there to sustain my interest from cover to cover. Seems like all the lengthy wordy articles were left for the back though, which is a shame and a few more photographs in the second half of the magazine wouldn't have gone amiss.

Have you read UK Cache Mag yet? What did you think of it? Post your comments below!