Geocaching and Adventures with Dan

Good morning everyone.  Who was busy finding caches in April while the pandemic was going on?  In Minnesota, that would be TriggerMN with 677 finds.  Next door in North Dakota, abby_h had the most with 47 finds.  Coming back to the Great White North, 3awesomeblackcats topped all Saskatchewan geocachers with 101 finds.  Locally in Manitoba, AngelFreak racked up 517 finds.  I had 14 finds, which is good enough for 129th place in Manitoba.

Recently I was asked to be a guest on Adventures with Dan's Cache Chat.  This is a fairly new podcast that Dan Hocieniec started.  I've never been a guest on a podcast or done anything like this.  I am a little excited and a little nervous as well.

Before we get into the show, let's find out who Dan Hocienciec is.  Better known as Danhoc82 to the geocaching world, or Adventures with Dan on YouTube, he got started in geocaching along with his wife when they started to hike the trails in their area in 2011.  It was Dan's wife that initially discovered geocaching while looking up trails on the world wide web.  Dan was a little reluctant at first as he thought he would be searching a large area for a container.  When he discovered that ground zero was actually a much smaller area, they loaded the car navigator, grabbed a note book that had coordinates, hints, a mini hand drawn map, and set out to find their very first geocache.  That would be "Creekside Picnic Cache" GZ2H8A7.  That was March 27, 2011.  That cache has since been archived.

Dan's parents gave him one of those Travelocity Gnomes to take around and take pictures of the places he's been while geocaching.  After a month or two of taking pictures, Dan decided to film the locations so his parents could see more of where he's been.  That was over three hundred videos ago and how Adventures with Dan on YouTube got started.  Recently Dan started a Cache Chat podcast.  Just like his videos where he points the spotlight on lesser known geocachers, Cache Chat allows other geocachers that don't normally make it on the other podcasts to share their adventures.  Everybody has a story to tell.  It doesn't matter if you have 50,000 finds or just five.  You found a geocache, you have a story to tell.

(Travelocity Gnome)

Having talked to Jesse (aka shortyknits) about what goes on behind the scenes with a podcast, I knew that I'd probably need Streamyard to do the show with.  That seems to be the popular platform of choice amongst podcasters.  Being a total newbie to this type of platform, I wasn't sure what to expect ahead of time.  Would there be a check in before the show?  What do I need or do before Friday?  The answers would come soon enough.

It is now Friday.  Show day.  My personal plan was grabbing my stuff after work and head over to SM66's house for the weekend.  That means I would be doing the show from her place.  SM66 was actually excited about the fact that I'll be on a podcast and wanted to sit just out of camera range and watch the show.  However, she had been busy all week having a raised patio built in her backyard with the help of a family member.  This was still going on when I arrived.  I still had an hour before Dan would send me a link to help access the show, so I was chipping in with the yard work, hauling some soil for landscaping.  Then it was off to order some pizza.  The restaurant wasn't answering the phone, so we had to go there and then have it delivered.  If I had stayed and waited for the pizza, I would have missed the show completely.  I let Dan know that I'd be checking in between 6:30pm and 6:45pm.  I got myself all set up, clicked on the link, only to discover that Streamyard doesn't accept my laptop's setup.  I need to download Google Chrome.  Ok.  That shouldn't be a problem.  I'm working against time now.  Less than ten minutes before show time and I'm still not checked in.  SM66 popped into the house to see how things were going.  I told her and she offered her computer as it has Google Chrome.  I quickly jumped on to her computer and was able to check in to the feed with maybe two minutes before showtime.  In hindsight, I guess we should have done a check in a few days earlier.  Who knew?  Thank you SM66 for saving the day.  :)

It's showtime.  Joining me is our host, Dan in the top left corner.  Hakliva, our resident geocaching vlogger in the top right corner, and myself on the bottom.  Being new at this, I figured out sometime during the show why I wasn't seeing the live chat on the side of my screen.  When I signed in, it was automatically put in private chat mode.  I did have my phone and propped it up under my screen.  The first thing I noticed when I did that was the time delay.  On my phone I could see me eating pizza, when I didn't have any in my hand while seeing this.  That meant that the chat I would see from my phone was also very delayed.  Chalk it up to a learning experience.

As Dan had told me ahead of time, there is no script for the show.  No topic per say.  Just go with the flow.  That's basically how the show went.  We talked mostly about geocaching, but we also strayed to other topics.  It was lighthearted and fun.  Two of us was eating pizza during the show, one wasn't.  Two of us had dogs making an appearance, one did not.  I had one of SM66's two dogs make an appearance.  He's sort of my other dog as he's excited when I show up.  I also get my dog fix as well since my boys dog has been out at the farm since the beginning of April.  It's a bit of a transition going from a Husky mix to a little Yorkie/Poodle mix.  

I watched the replay with SM66 on Saturday after spending the day working on the landscaping around the new patio.  Now I can read all the comments.  Hakliva was the clear favorite of the chat room.  LOL.  Since I was set up in the kitchen, we could see how many times SM66 popped in, bringing me pizza so I wouldn't have to leave the show and just seeing how things were going.  I had Dex (the little Yorkie/Poodle) hanging around me during the show, mostly because I had pizza.  I had all sorts of distractions going on, but it was all fun.  SM66 noted that we would get off topic from geocaching and Dan, being the good host would pull us back to geocaching.  That's what happens when you get people together at an event.  The conversations will stray one way or the other, but eventually comes back to geocaching.  That's how Dan likes his show to be.  Fee flowing as if we were sitting at a bar talking.   I did get Google Chrome downloaded to my laptop, so Streamyard should be good to go for any future show appearances.  I'd be more than happy to be a guest on Dan's show again.  We barely scratched the surface when it comes to stories.

Thank you Dan for having me on your show.  It was a blast.  For those who missed the show can catch the replay here > Cache Chat  The show is an hour and twenty minutes long, but it goes by really fast.  You can catch Dan's show live on Fridays, 8pm Eastern, 7pm Central.  It's worth checking out.  You can subscribe to Dan's You Tube channel and click on the bell so you'll be notified when Dan has published new content.  You can find his You Tube channel here >   Adventures with Dan

That's all for this week.  Until next time, Be happy, be safe, keep a safe distance from others, follow the arrows on the floor at grocery stores (even though I don't LOL), enjoy life (even during these stressful times), and most of all, have fun.  Peace out.

(this is Dex, my doggie fix while Lilo is away at the farm)