Good morning everyone. It's off to New Jersey, the home of Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi. The oldest and the cache with the most favorite points is 'gerbiL cacHe' GCCC8. Placed in November, 2000, this cache has been found 1,265 times so far and has 498 favorite points.
I'm going to attempt something new. That would be a summary of my geocaching during the first three months of 2021. In order for me to have something to report, I need to get out and do some geocaching. This is coming off the worst year for geocaching by numbers compared to previous years. I can't blame the pandemic for it either. Life got in the way, pure and simple. With my recent move complete (the bulk of it anyway), I'm hoping to get out more. I'm also hoping to get caught up on geocaching videos. I was even falling behind in that too. Let's see how the first three months have turned out so far.
January: I started off with a bang. 47 total finds. Twenty five of those are from five Adventure Labs. Just on non Adventure Labs, that's 22 finds, one shy of my best month in all of 2020.
This is an awesome TB hotel I found in January. I didn't have any travel bugs to drop off and I didn't pick up any to move. I've sort of gotten away from the whole TB part of the game.
This was another awesome gadget cache that I found in January. Not only do you have to solve a puzzle to find this, you have to solve how to get the container.
Looking back at my Year in Review blog, I noted a few holes in my Jasmer calendar. I was missing three months from 2020. I filled those in quickly. I also added to my Fizzy grid by filling in a square. It was a very productive month.
February: Life got in the way of my return to geocaching. First, the weather got really cold. It doesn't matter if you read the temperatures in Celcius or Fahrenheit, -40 is -40 on both scales. Add to that, the brakes needed replacing on my car. I heard a grinding noise when I came to a stop one day. Not a good sound to hear. I'm not much of a mechanic, but I knew it had to be the brakes. I did manage to find one traditional and complete one Adventure Lab. I went from 47 finds in January to 6 in February.
The only traditional I found right after getting the brakes fixed.
The only Adventure Lab I did.
March: This started as a continuation of February. Not much in the way of geocaching. I decided that I need to get myself back out there. The weather became awesome, considering it was still March. Going from -40 in February to above melting temps by mid-March was fantastic. I took to short walks after work on a power trail, grabbing five here, five there. That adds up. What got me going was a push towards my 6,000th find. I'm approaching two and a half years since I claimed my 5,000th find. For me, that's a long time between milestones. In total for March, 43 finds plus 2 Adventure Labs. That gives me a three month total of 106 finds. I had 157 for all of 2020.
March also saw my first two FTFs since June, 2020. As I grabbed these two, I started to think of my very first FTF. That occurred in March as well. When I got home, I looked up my FTFs (I have 44 so far), and my very first one came exactly seven years to the day. March 14.
Moving forward, I'm going to bring back an old goal that I had, fill in my days found calendar so that eventually, all dates will show eleven finds. I'm currently working on my fifth loop, meaning the days with the fewest show 4. This is more a long-term goal, so for now, I will try to complete the fifth loop. Unfortunately, I don't have another day with a 4 until October. It's the Winter months that have all the fours right now. I'm also going to work on filling a calendar of just Mystery type caches. I have a completed calendar of traditionals. Having done a daily streak of 1,010 days, you would think I would have a traditional one complete. When I looked into this, I discovered that the last day that I filled in for traditional was near the very end of that streak. 950+ days before getting that one day. Getting back to the Mystery cache calendar, I currently have 213/366 days covered.
Before I wrap things up, I want to include one more thing. Technically, this occurred in the second quarter (April 1st), but I don't want to wait three months to share this, since I've already been announcing it on social media. I did GC8NEAT after work, giving me my 6,000th find. I like to have a different cache type with each milestone and getting a locationless was perfect.
Onward to my 7,000th find. Will I get it this year? Who knows. I don't want to go too crazy finding geocaches to the point that I feel burnt out again. Of course there's still a pandemic that includes travel restrictions. Plus the border between Canada and the U.S. is still closed. I doubt I'll be doing much traveling. Just as well. I can save money towards attending Geo-Woodstock in 2022. I'm hopeful that will happen.
Onward to the next three months of 2021. The only goal I'll be working on is the Mystery calendar. There are two souvenir promotions happening. Wonders of the World and the new Science of Discovery. I don't plan those. I get them by doing my own thing. If I get one of the souvenirs one day, fantastic. If not, there's always tomorrow. I don't go out of my way.
Just a reminder of the April photo contest. This month's theme is a picture of yourself picking up litter (or the bag that you filled). You can send your entries to thegeocachingguild@gmail.com or message me on Twitter using @thegeocaching1 Twitter account. With the recent snow around here, I didn't get out to pick up any litter. Hopefully next week I can get out and do more CITO.
Until next week, be happy, stay safe, wash your hands and wear a mask, hug your furry critters, and most importantly, have fun. Peace out.
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