Seeking Smileys Challenge

Geocaching has spun the Wheel of Challenges and for the month of April, the challenge is Seeking Smileys. From April 3 through April 30, three souvenirs of differing difficulty levels can be earned by logging finds:

• Easy - 5 finds
• Medium - 10 finds
• Hard - 100 finds

You can watch the video of the wheel spin here.

Now it's time for some speculation. The icons shown on the wheel are making me think about what the challenges might be. There's a Star, a Question Mark, a Heart, a Smiley Face, a Car and People. We now know that the Smiley Face represents finding caches, any caches. The Heart probably represents highly favorited caches - so finding caches with 10+ favorite points or cumulative favorite points on caches found. The Question Mark might be finding Mystery (Unknown) caches and the People could be attending Events. More than likely, the Star is a streak of some duration. The hardest to figure out is the Car. I'm thinking that it might mean the distance of cache finds from your home location - you know, car, road trip? If so, I hope that one is in May, August or September, since I'll be traveling. Likewise, I hope that the streak challenge is not in those months, since I'll be traveling and won't have access to a car (or even land in some cases). I'm excited, but I'm also worried that I won't complete all of the levels of these challenges. I pride myself on showing restraint and not running out whenever a new cache publishes, I want to have something to find when challenges arise, but there have been sooooo many challenges and not nearly enough caches published within a reasonable distance - I am going to have to go way out of my way for these. But then again, I guess that's what makes them a challenge. Happy hunting!

Edit 04/12/23: I just got the Shop Geocaching newsletter, and in their description of the geocoin associated with the Wheel of Challenges, they mention six of the icons and what they mean (it looks like I missed one). The challenges mentioned are:

• Get smilies
• Mystery
• Multi
• Start a streak
• Cache with friends
• Road trip!

I'm excited to find out what Cache with Friends and Road Trip entail.