If you’re the “owner” of a geocache, it means you have to take care of it. That’s the reason why usually if you want to publish a geocache far away from your set home location you will receive a message saying “Thanks for the idea, but we prefer non-holiday caches”.

Taking care means to check regularly, or at least after receiving several “Did not find”-logs, if your cache is still situated where it should be, if nothing is broken, if nothing unappropriate was put into the container, or if the logbook is full. Usually things like this will be reported in logs, anyways. Still it is good to check by yourself 😉

Of course, in case the container gets “muggled” (thrown away by non-cachers) or is too destroyed to be simply fixed, you’ll have to replace it. This already happened to several of my caches. Fortunately, my brother is always in the area, so the caches can stay online and active even when I’m not around (as most of the time).

Once this summer, when I was back home, I had a look at one of my caches, situated in the “Industrial Area” of Pflach. It’s a pretty busy cache, so the logbook was full within less then a year. That’s a long time for other areas, but for Reutte, it’s still good 😉

And here are the scans of the logbook:

There are also two funny stories about this cache: The Berlin Craftsman and The Confused Geocachers.

In the short time since I started geocaching, I’ve already seen some awesome hiding places and ways of disguising cache containers. Unfortunately, I’ve rarely taken pictures, so you will have to to read my descriptions and try to picture the spots and camouflages yourself 😉

Category: “Why should I hide it?”
There are two geocaches of this category I especially like.
One is called “I love you”, and can be found at the Danube channel. There is no container, but a big graffiti of a
parchment scroll on one of the designated graffiti-walls. Your task: get your name and today’s date onto that scroll.

The other is a cache for premium members only, so no name and no place information … it’s in the Inner City at a bus stop, and also not hidden at all. There’s just this box that looks a bit like a control box, and the log book and trading items are in there. Have fun getting that box from it’s place, because every second about 20 muggels will see you.

Category: “Why should anybody find it without searching for an hour?”
This is great stuff. For example, go to some small street in the old parts of Stockholm, where GPS reception is basically zero, go to a certain house and look for a nano cache (about the size of your pinky’s nail). The hint is: “hinge”. Or, search for a cache of unknown size at dam. The hint: steel beam. There are 7 of them, each about 10 meters long, and reception is bad as hell. In the end, the container turns out to be the casing of a pen, hidden in a hose you had in your hands for 3 times at least.

I think will post some more of these … but at the moment I’m really busy with University. Sorry for that.

Again, a short story about the Cache at the “Industrial Area” where my mum and brother work. It’s not one single story, but something that happens time and time again and can also be seen in the cache logs on Geocaching.com.

The cache is hidden on the private property of the company my brother and mum are working at. Usually, caches are hidden in public locations, so no trespassing issues can occur. But as the best hiding place in my opinion was right where the cache is hidden, I had to hide it on the private property. And as requested in the rules for hiding geocaches, I do point out in the description that the property can and must be entered.

Still, my mum keeps telling me that people stop in front of the fence, look at their devices and then look up, startled and confused. They search the fence for some minutes, and then some give up, and some overcome their inhibitions and go to the other side of the fence. That’s the ones who will be successful, of course 😉

A recommendation for newbie-cachers: If you don’t bring the full description, you should at least print a list of the caches you want to do, including hints and parts of the description, like “private property can and must be entered”.

The geocache owned by me (and my brother), situated at the “Industrial Area” of Pflach, is located right in front of the window to my mom’s office. My brother is working there, too, so I have people around to take care of this cache.

One day, the following log was posted to the cache:

First I did not really want to enter the private property, especially as there were two workers around. One of them, from Berlin judging by his accent, said “I won’t tell you where it’s hidden” – but I still found it. ‘Twas funny!

Logs like this are not rare for this cache, my mom seems to be have nice chats with cachers, too 🙂