Geocaching with Woo

The Woodbooger GeoTour launched in 2018, and when I first learned about it, I thought it would be right up Tom's alley, with it's Woodbooger (Bigfoot) implications. We were fortunate enough to have a few days of favorable weather this weekend, so Tom contacted sewwatt, one of the GeoTour organizers, and learned that the geocoins were dwindling in number. She confirmed that we could complete the GeoTour in a day, so we tacked a trip down to Norton, Virginia onto the end of our trip to Berkeley County, West Virginia. We enjoyed the GeoTour, and were able to find all 25 caches, earning the geocoin and the souvenir. The majority of the caches were birdhouse hosts with a container inside, a few of those were field puzzles. There were a few gadget caches, several Letterbox caches and even an EarthCache. The Flag Rock Recreation Area was a beautiful sight to see, and even though we didn't see a Woodbooger, we enjoyed our time in Norton.  

I recently learned that a new GeoTour will be posting in the Mid-Atlantic region celebrating Smokey the Bear's 75th Anniversary - the Smokey Bear 75th Anniversary GeoTour. It starts on July 7, 2019 and the following prizes will be available: 75 Smokey Bear "First-to-Find" tokens A Smokey 75th trackable coin if you are the first to find all of the caches in one state A limited edition diamond geocoin for completing the entire GeoTour (all 75 caches) Read the official notice here - you can download your passport there, too.

Today, Tom and I traveled to Martinsburg, West Virginia in order to do the Mystery Caches of Berkeley County (MCBC). I had recently started a list of trips that Tom and I could take to use up my vacation time at work, and the GeoTrails in Berkeley County were on the list. In researching them, I learned that the MCBC cache pages had been updated in January 2019 to state that there were only 60 geocoins left and that only 11 of the remaining 14 caches were needed to qualify for them, instead of the initial 13 out of 15. Then, we saw in the latest issue of FTF Magazine that a new GeoTour would be launching in Berkeley County at the beginning of June, and I figured that with the possibility of people pouring in for the new, official GeoTour, that the remaining geocoins would be snatched up in no time. Tom made a phone call and learned that there were only "about 20" geocoins left. He also learned that the MCBC would be deactivated before the newest GeoTour published - we had...