This past Saturday, Karen, Sarah and I went out geocaching with friends Todd and Megan. They have been doing this for a short time, and seemed to really enjoy it, so we decided to go along with them. They have a Garmin ForeTrex GPS unit that we loaded up with about 6 or 7 waypoints for caches from geocaching.com in and around Lancaster County Park.
Our first geocache we went searching for, Indian Warrior Trading Path, was a quick, easy and successful find. Our second venture, Lancaster County Central Park Bushwack, was not so successful. By this time, Sarah had awoken from her nap, so I had to stay back with her, but Karen and Megan went looking. They ran into a large patch of burnhazel which hampered their progress. There was also too much tree cover to get a good reading from the GPS. It kept saying 300-400 feet in random directions. We finally decided to give up on this one and move onto another, and revisit this cache later when the burnhazel was not so bad.
Next was a simple, virtual cache at the Garden of Five senses where we were just able to enjoy the garden and answer a few questions that we posed by the cache creator and answered by reading the plaques. This will technically be my second find of my geocaching experience.
Now off to our third successful find of the day with Timberrrrrr!!!!!. Again, this was Karen, Megan and I. We left Sarah back with Todd at the garden and went on a hike. The trails for this one were nicely kept (as with all of the park trails), and this was an easy to moderate hike for my out of shape body. Once we got to where the GPS said approaching destination, it took us a bit of hunting to actually find the cache, but once found, it was quite obvious that the cache was hiden in this spot. This one was truely my find as I happened to locate the hiding place first. Another, but final, success for the day.
With our fifth and final cache hunt of the day, we simply ran out of light, and the GPS was not cooperating once again under the heavy cover of the woods. This was a two part cache, and Megan found the first part after some time looking around the area. We could not, however, find the second part. This is now on our list of ones to finish.
All in all, we had a great outing on Saturday. Karen and I even went out to the mall on Sunday to Eastern Mountain Sports and bought a Garmin eTrex Legend GPS unit so we can continue our quests. I have created an account on Geocaching.com with the usual username of "shoutstudios". Look for me out on the trails enjoying being outdoors and having fun with my wife and daughter.
Like many other people I know, I have become increasingly frustrated by all of the junk mail I receive on a regular basis. No, I'm not talking about email, I'm talking about mail through the postal service. This frustrates me on many levels. With all the concern over identity theft and privacy, "pre-approved" loan offers through the mail can not be a good idea. I am also a big environmentalist, so the waste of paper and other resources really bugs me. I can't imagine that companies make enough money off these mailings to justify the damage they are causing.
I have wondered in the past whether or not I could get a way with marking the junk mail "Refused - Return to sender" and putting it back in the mail, causing the company that is sending the mailings to be inundated with returned mail, and having to pay the postage. Not that one person doing this would make all that much of a difference. After reading this article (free registration required) from the NY Times, I feel like my possible solution has some merit. There are cases in there of people doing similar things. The best part, it doesn't appear that these activities are illegal. I may have to try this out on a few pieces of junk mail and see if I get any reaction.
On a side note, to avoid the registration required to read the NY Times article, check out BugMeNot.com.