Geocaching with Woo

The Middle of Everywhere GeoTour kicked off on May 3, 2025, and was on my list of tings to do while in West Virginia for GeoWoodstock XXI . A couple of years ago (around 2022), I heard about the Marion County Murals Geocaching Trail, and had hoped to travel there to complete it. Marion County had sponsored GeoTrails in the past, but that was the first one I had heard of. The Middle of Everywhere GeoTour (MOE-GT) incorporated some of the same locations, and added more, maybe from previous GeoTrails. The caches were divided into four different categories, each being a specific cache type, and at least four caches out of each category had to be found in order to be eligible for the geocoin. Finding all twenty would give you the souvenir. After attending GeoWoodstock through lunch, we left Mylan Park and headed south, hoping to find the required 16 out of 20 caches needed to earn the geocoin. We heard from multiple sources that it would take eight to ten hours, so we were on a time...

The Country Roads Challenge was released on May 22, 2025, as a side event for GeoWoodstock XXI . It included ten locations, with an approximate drive time of 1.5 hours, from beginning to end. These locations were intended to bring geocachers to venues that were off the beaten path, but still worth a visit. An Adventure Lab was also co-located with eight of the ten stops, with an additional two along way. These caches were well placed for us. While travelling to West Virginia for GeoWoodstock via I-68, the caches fell in line with our travel plans and the whole challenge took us about 3½ hours to complete. Our final destination, before retiring for the evening, was Woodstock on the Wharf , and the last cache left us close to that location. The caches were easy to find, and the code words for the Adventure Labs well placed, especially for venues that happened to be closed. Retrieval of the trackable geocoin was easy, too. Just bring the completed passport to the Visit Mo...

Well, my geocaching year was pretty uneventful. I ended up finding less than 200 geocaches - to include Adventure Labs - but I was able to earn every souvenir available this year. I think my best (and proudest) achievements were finding a few geocaches in Asia, when I went on a short trip to Vietnam to visit family. I found some Adventure Labs at the airport in Tokyo, and was unable to locate one, so I tried to guess where the bonus cache would be. Unfortunately, I couldn't find it, and came close to missing my connecting flight. The Adventure Labs didn't earn me a souvenir for Japan, so I created my own, and if I'm ever passing though the airport in Tokyo again, I know exactly where to go to earn the actual souvenir. I found both Adventure Labs and physical caches in Vietnam, as well as attended an event, so I earned a souvenir there. The airport in Korea didn't have anything easy to grab, so I missed out on that country. My next best achievement was being ask...

What did I accomplish this year? The answer is easy - nothing! At least where geocaching is concerned. That's not to say I didn't go geocaching, I did, and pretty often, but I kept busy this year trying to keep up with all of the souvenir campaigns. Check out my summary graphic to see what I mean: I started the year off by finishing up the Signal's Labyrinth campaign, then moved right in to the next multi-month souvenir campaign, the Wheel of Challenges. Taking two cruise vacations got me geocaching on four new Caribbean islands, where I earned location-specific souvenirs. My goals for 2024 are varied. I have some more travel planned, so getting new country souvenirs is something I'm working towards - I've even planned one leg of a flight so that it would go through a specific country that has Adventure labs in the airport. In December, I was contacted by an officer of the Maryland Geocaching Society and asked if I would like to hide a cache for their annu...

Boy, am I late this year! For the first week of January, I was on a cruise and had no internet access and I feel like I'm lucky to have finished my graphic today. Unfortunately, this year I did not complete a single goal that I made last year. Blame it on the pandemic. So, without any further interuption, this was my geocaching year in all it's glory! So, as is evidenced by the above graphic, I earned all of the souvenirs offered by Geocaching this year. In addition to all of those, a new country souvenir was created for Jamaica, where I've found a cache several years ago and I "found" my first locationless cache, GC8NEAT . We participated in the 2021 Cache Across Maryland as well as completed enough of the American Revolution GeoTrail in New Jersey to earn the geocoin. I've been sending in submissions for the "I Found Sparticus" contest in FTF Geocacher magazine for some time, and I finally won an I Found Sparticus Pathtag in the random d...

Yesterday, Tom and I returned from New Jersey and a brutal six days working on the American Revolution GeoTrail . I first learned about it last year, while looking up information for 2020's Metro Gathering , which was being held in conjunction with the kick-off of the GeoTrail. Well, the event didn't happen, due to COVID, but the GeoTrail launch did. 77 caches were placed throughout the northern half of New Jersey, at locations significant to the American Revolution. The first 100 geocachers to find a minimum of 50 of these caches - 27 of which are required - will be awarded a geocoin. Unfortunately, one of the required caches is inside the Ford Mansion (Washington's Headquarters), which has been closed to the public ever since the COVID epidemic. We'll have to go back when it re-opens in order to earn our geocoin. For the most part, we really enjoyed our time visiting the historic locations and learning the stories about the people that helped form our nation. ...

Wow! This past year did not turn out the way I expected. Despite all of my well laid-out plans, things just did not work out. I had made travel arrangements for an epic trip to Washington state for different activities, but they were all cancelled due to the pandemic. Despite all of that, I was able to accomplish the things illustrated in the graphic below: I was able to earn all but two of the souvenirs that came out this year - due to COVID-19, there were no CITO events in my area. Some had been planned, but they were cancelled. If I lived further West, I probably could have earned them, I'm disappointed to miss out on them. We went to New York, a new state for us to cache in, and found enough caches to earn the Experience Tioga County GeoTour geocoin. My 2500 find achievement was published in FTF Geocacher magazine. I completed the "Walk the Camino de Santiago with the FTF Guy," put out an Adventure Lab and completed the virtual "Lost Places World Tour....

I completed the Memory Lane campaign today. I've just come through a rough couple of weeks, and Tom thought that going out Geocaching would give me something to be happy about, so we planned for today to be the day. Since Tom had recently had some problems with his back, he requested that the geocaching be easy-going. I'd just put out an Adventure Lab, so I thought we could go ahead and grab some of the Adventure Labs in the area, as well as some caches that were close to each stop. This ended up working out really well. The Memory Lane campaign allowed Adventure Labs to be counted in the final point count, so after beginning the day with 55 points and having earned only two souvenirs to date, I ended up with 255 points and the final three souvenirs!     I liked that there were different point values for different caches, so that I could maximize the value of the caches that I visited - if I wanted to. In order to complete this campaign, a maximum of 40 or a min...

After reviewing my Geocaching goals for this past year, I wasn't able to accomplish the big one, but I did accomplish a few of the smaller ones. Of the 44 remaining Find Your Chesapeake GeoTour caches that we needed to find in order to earn the souvenir, we found two. Yup, two. But they were great! We rented a paddle boat (the kayak didn't work out because of Tom's back) and paddled around Trap Pond at Trap Pond State Park in Delaware to find them. We completed both the Eight Wards of Washington, D.C. GeoTrail and the Caching the Rain GeoTrail, put out one new geocache, and hosted a Creation Celebration event. What else did we accomplish? I've put together this graphic to illustrate these achievements: In addition to the souvenirs that are familiar to most geocachers, we completed, and received awards for, the Eight Wards of Washington, D.C. GeoTrail, the 2019 Cache Across Maryland, the Mystery Caches of Berkeley County, the 2016 Hanover GeoTrail, the Smart Ca...

The Caching the Rain GeoTrail launched in June 2014 with six geocaches in Montgomery County, Maryland . If you found all six geocaches and answered a survey and the questions found on the passport , you would earn a geocoin. The caches had informative "booklets" inside, promoting storm water awareness. Tom and I decided to go out today and give this GeoTrail a try. The caches were relatively easy to find and there was a nice variety of hides. At this point in time, two of the caches are no longer the original containers, so the informational "booklets" from those caches are no longer available, which was disappointing. Luckily, there are still plenty of educational signs along the GeoTrail, and we were still able to learn a lot. There was also difficulty with one of the passport questions - the signage appears to have changed since 2014. I got the answer with a little trial and error, but if you're reading this, B=7. My favorite cache that we found...

The Smokey Bear 75th Anniversary GeoTour (SBGT) launched in July 2019. In honor of Smokey Bear’s 75 years protecting America’s forests and wildlands, the Mid-Atlantic Forest Fire Protection Compact has established a Geocaching GeoTour. There are 75 caches located across the seven states that comprise the Mid-Atlantic Compact: Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia. The GeoTour launched with only 73 geocaches, and one has since been archived. The four prizes that were available at launch, for finding the geocache and recording the codeword, were: 75 First-to-find tokens Smokey 75th Trackable Coins for finding 6 caches in any one state Limited Edition Diamond Geocoins for finding 25 caches along the GeoTour A special gift from Smokey Bear for finding all 75 GeoTour geocaches Tom and I went to Delaware today with the express purpose of finding the last five geocaches that we needed to earn the Smokey 75th Trackable Coin. Before beginning ...

The Maryland Chocolate Trail launched in April 2019 and started out with 15 geocaches. The prize for finding all 15 caches, recording the codewords found in each cache and submitting the passport is a Pathtag. The traditional caches along the trail are located near, or at, chocolate shops throughout Maryland, and the mystery caches start at chocolate shops where information that leads to the final locations is gathered. The majority of the geocaches were birdhouses secured with locks, with the combinations provided on the cache pages. Today, Tom and I found the last cache that we needed to complete the Maryland Chocolate Trail. Even though I didn't take advantage of the chocolate-buying opportunities, it was still enjoyable. I found this trail to be quite straightforward and had very little difficulty finding the caches. I think my favorite cache along the trail was MDCT - Michelle Ferrero - the final location was great! I will be submitting my codewords tomorrow, and w...

This year, Tom and I attended our first Metro Gathering , and had a pretty good time. This year's theme was Pirates of Port Royale, and there were plenty of things to do. Prior to the event, there was their " Golden Ticket " contest. Golden Tickets were periodically hidden in geocaches, and hints to their whereabouts were posted on the Metro Gathering website, along with a general location (the state). If you were to find the "Golden Ticket," follow the directions and bring it to the Metro Gathering, you would get a special geocoin. It took me a while to figure out the hints, but I eventually got the hang of figuring out which geocache to look in for the Golden Ticket. Unfortunately, the majority of them were in New Jersey, so I never actually found one, but, knowing how much I love a good puzzle, I'll definitely keep track in upcoming years for one that I might have a chance of finding. There were 50 Adventure Lab Caches put out in conjunction with ...

Now that the 2019 summer campaign has come to a close, I guess it's about time I had an opinion about it. My initial thoughts were about how cool the theme was. I thoroughly enjoyed the teasers and all of my speculations were for naught - for a change. After earning, and looking at, the "Briefed on the Case" souvenir, I immediately knew how to figure out what the lock combination was. It took some planning, but after learning what caches would count towards the "Evidence Collected" souvenir, it was only logical that any other caches with an unknown clue type would go towards the "Jewels Recovered" souvenir. But which ones? I found an area where there were plenty of caches that had Jewel clues, then cached my way through Evidence clues until I got there. Luckily, I didn't have to venture too far away from that area to recover all of the jewels. But then, I hit a snag. Instead of being able to enter the lock combination at that point, I had...

Earlier this week, Tom mentioned that he'd like to go to Kent Island this Saturday to do a little geocaching, and I mentioned that we should schedule a trip to West Virginia in the not-to-distant future, because the number of geocoins remaining for the Smart Caches of Berkeley County and the Berkeley Gadgets GeoTour were slowly dwindling. He decided that we would scrap the initial plans and head back to West Virginia for an overnight stay, since the GeoTour includes three night caches. The Berkeley Gadgets GeoTour consists of 50 caches, which include 18 newly published caches (BGG), a selection of caches from three previous GeoTrails (GBC, MCBC and SCBC ) and a handful of other caches the have been put out by WVTim. In order to qualify for the Berkeley Gadgets GeoTour geocoin, we had to find 16 of the 18 BGG caches. I'm happy to say that we found 17 of them! We're well on our way to earning the souvenir, too. Our past two trips have netted us 42 of the 50 required ...

While Tom and I were in Berkeley County, West Virginia to work on the Berkeley Gadgets GeoTour , we ended up finding all but two of the Smart Caches of Berkeley County (SCBC). In order to earn the SCBC geocoin, we had to find eleven of the fourteen remaining SCBC caches, which gave us the ability to pick and choose which ones to find. The hard part in choosing was that three of them are not on the Berkeley Gadgets GeoTour, so do we go with GeoTour caches exclusively, or do we find the ones that are near other caches? We ended up finding the three non-GeoTour caches, and leaving two GeoTour caches for a future trip. These caches were varied and fun to complete. My favorite was "SCBC 7 Bike Trail," where I had to travel about 400 feet down a corrugated pipe to end up in the middle of an expressway. The most difficult one for me was "SCBC 12 Illuminating," but only because the flashlight that I was using wasn't strong enough to trigger the sensors. "SC...

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.  

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...

After completing the Cache Carnival, and not having to stress about points on finds, my parents, Tom and I headed back to Washington, D.C. to start working on the Eight Wards of Washington, D.C. GeoTrail . The GeoTrail consists of nine caches: eight letterboxes and one eight-stage multiple. The prize for completing the GeoTrail is a geocoin (while supplies last), and can be earned by stamping your passport with the stamp found in each of the nine caches. While we weren't entirely successful in completing the GeoTrail in one day (we couldn't find one of the caches), it was definitely achievable. Various puzzles were used for the coordinates for the letterboxes, and I was able to solve them prior to the trip. The route we took to make the best use of our time was Multi stage 1, Letterbox #1, Multi stage 2, Letterbox #2, etc. The areas we drove through were unexpected (Georgetown, really?), and I thought that some of the parks (like the Chuck Brown Memorial Park) were hidd...

The 16th annual Cache Across Maryland (CAM) kicked off on March 16, 2019. Ten CAM caches were hidden all over Maryland, and the coordinates were posted on the Maryland Geocaching Society's Forums at 8:00 a.m. Four kick-off events were held in different sections of Maryland where the event hosts uploaded the CAM caches, as well as Bonus caches, onto attendees' GPSr's. If a participant finds all ten CAM caches and records the symbol in each cache, they can find out what the coordinates to the CAM Picnic, being held on May 4, where they will be awarded a certificate of completion and a trackable geocoin. Participants have six weeks to find all ten caches, and still be eligible to attend the picnic; the caches will be published on Geocaching.com the day of the picnic. Tom and I decided to try it this year, and we invited my parents, DragonSoldier45 and DragonLadyHue, to join us. After attending the Kick-Off event, the four of us joined three other cachers, formulated a...