Get Outside Geocaching-- With Your Phone!

This is a sponsored post from U.S. Cellular.  All opinions are my own.

Did you know it's American Adventures month?  In celebration of it, the National Park Service is waving admittance fees on August 25.  That's right, you can visit a national park for FREE!  Many of the apps I mention in this post are fantastic for helping to explore anywhere outdoors.

One hobby my husband and I enjoy which is NOT allowed in a national park is geocaching.  (Many states allow it in state parks, and some states actually set up geocaches in their parks.) It's a fun app for everyone for your phone.  Geocaches are rated from 1/1 (the easiest) to 5/5 (the most difficult)  Kids really love the adventure as it's like an outdoor  treasure hunt.  All 1/1 geocaches are free on the app, but you need to pay a fee to have access to others.  In addition, all the 1/? caches are wheelchair accessible! Because I have U.S. Cellular as my service provider, their "in the middle of anywhere" service makes it super easy to stay connected to loved ones or to my Geocaching app!

Weekly Geocaching Roundup #4

It's been a busy geocaching week for us.  On Thursday, my boyfriend had a short work meeting in a town an hour away then the rest of the day free, so I tagged along and we went geocaching afterwards.  We decided to go up into Pennsylvania and see what we could find, and we did find some neat ones.  After he worked all weekend, he had two days off in a row, so we decided to go on an overnight trip to Martinsburg, West Virginia.  This is one of the best geocaching areas in the country.  WVTIM loves putting out gadget caches, and I regret we were only able to find about 30 caches during our trip.  One reason for that is we did the Villages of Berkeley County geotrail to get this cool coin.

The Villages GeoTrail covered a lot of area, but they were easy to find, it was just a lot of driving between caches.  The gadgets were more concentrated in area, but they took a slight bit more figuring to open -- you had to solve a puzzle to be able to open the combination lock on them.  Most of them were much more simple than we tried to make this.   This is the first gadget cache we found, and it was actually quite easy.  Each of these vials contained a scent and on the cache page there was a list of scents.  We had to put them in order, and the order gave us the combination to the lock based on the numbers at each scent.

At this one, the cache was under a merry go round.  You can watch the video here:  (warning includes spoilers)

So here I am getting the cache.   I was going to make my boyfriend get the cache, but I couldn't get the merry go round to go as fast as required.  So I was the lucky one who got to get dizzy.

At this one we had to play a song to be able to figure out the combination to the lock that opens the cache!

We didn't have time to get both geocoins -- we are two caches away from the coin for the gadget trail!  In addition to those on the trail, there are so many fantastic geocaches in the Martinsburg, WV area that we are hoping to go back another time!

Thursday:  15
Monday: 16
Tuesday: 14
Wednesday: 1

Total: 151

Weekly Geocaching Round-Up #3

My weekly post about Geocaching.

My boyfriend and I each hit 100 finds this week.   I have found six without him, so I hit find 100 at a guardrail.  I was so excited I wanted to stop at the closest geocache!  His was much cooler.

His find #100:

This was at a place called Lincoln Motor Court, and it is just charming.  I want to spend the night there sometime.  Cute retro cabins, what's not to love?  Reminds me so much of when I was growing up, we'd always stay at mom and pop hotels on vacation to Pennsylvania.

One cache we got this week that I thought was really cool was this one.   In this photo you can see three states (Pennsylvania, Maryland, and West Virginia) as well as seven counties.  My geography isn't good enough to tell you which counties you can see, but I can tell you they are in the above states! 

This was one of our DNFs this week.  It was labeled as terrain 1, but a local geocacher told me because it's one of the oldest caches in the area, terrain was graded a bit differently back then.  Now a "1" should be handicapped accessible, but this "1" you have to walk down to the wheel and underneath the building.  Now that she helped us in knowing where it is (we were having GPS bounce), we can get it sometime.

This was my favorite cache of the week.  It was at a church built in 1804.  So much history here.   My parents sold tombstones when I was growing up, and I have always enjoyed walking through cemeteries reading gravestones.

This man fought in the Revolutionary War.  To him, and every other Revolutionary War Veteran in this cemetery, I thank you for your service to this country.

Less than a half mile from the cemetery was Little Boy Blue -- and my boyfriend pretending to be Little Boy Blue!

Next week is going to be a huge geocaching week for us, so stay tuned!

This week's stats:

Saturday: 2
Sunday: 2
Monday: 3
Wednesday:7

Did Not Finds:   3

Total:  106


Come join the fun at Geocaching.com

Weekly Geocaching Round-up #2

This was a slower caching week for us (at least compared to the last couple ones!)  There was a lot of rain that kept us inside!

This week we mainly stayed in West Virginia.   My boyfriend's favorite cache of the week was in Grafton WV.  We didn't find this one as someone who wasn't a geocacher came along to check on the paint job that was done on the caboose that day.

My favorite cache was the one at the Mother's Day Shrine in Grafton, WV.  (Just up the street from the caboose.)  It was a micro, but I loved the location.

The funniest thing this week happened at a cache along the WV Civil War Trail.  There was a toddler whose mother was working in the gift shop by the cache.  The toddler was in a toy battery powered police car, and when we got out of our car, he turned on the siren, followed us to the cache and said he was giving us a ticket for walking on freshly mowed grass.  We played along.

This week's stats:

Friday: 2
Saturday: 9
Tuesday: 8

Total:  91

Travel Bugs registered as collectable:  2
First to Find caches:  1

Weekly Geocaching Round-up #1

I've decided to try and post every Thursday about my geocaching that week because Friday starts the weekend and it's a good way to keep it in my mind what geocaches I grabbed that week.

Last Friday, my boyfriend had the day off and we went to a Geocaching event.  One word of warning -- Geocaching.com e-mails give distance as the crow flies, so it was a bit more of a trek than we expected, but we hit some thrift shops along the way and also found a few geocaches.  That evening we met some great people who I expect will be "distant friends"  (not the type you can ask to come over for an evening, but ones you might see a few times a year.)  One couple even told us to let them know when we'd be in the area again and they would go geocaching with us, even revisiting caches they have already visited.

Sunday was Mother's Day, and that's a difficult day for me.  We were going to spend the day doing Urban caches, but it was graduation at WVU, and we didn't want to be in Morgantown that day, so we headed out and kind of just ended up where we wandered.  We found some great caches.

My boyfriend's favorite of the day was one we had to log "Did Not Find" because it was so difficult.  But being male, he thought a tank was just cool!

My favorite one was the toll house at Addison, Pennsylvania.  I am not sure when they levied fines for those entering Pennsylvania but a sheet was a 3 cent toll.

We're new at geocaching, and this weeks stats were:

Friday: 6 (includes event)
Sunday: 14
Wednesday: 2
Weekly total: 22

Total:  73

Travel bugs found in the wild:  2
Travel bugs discovered at an event: 2
Travel bugs registered to release:  3

The weather (and work schedule) wasn't  as cooperative as we'd hoped, but unfortunately for finances, my boyfriend has five days off out of the next seven (unfortunately there's one work day thrown in there so we can't go too far away if we would decide to!)  I expect we'll have a lot more to report next week than we did this week.  We met someone last week who once logged 120 finds in one day.  Wow.  We have a long way to go to get to that, and we've even met someone who has logged 10,000 geocaches, so we are really newbies. But we're having fun and finding some cool places I never knew existed in our area.

Geocaching: Seven Quick Takes Friday

If you aren't aware what Geocaching is, it's using GPS to find "treasure" hidden in the woods.  If you don't have a GPS you can find many caches by downloading the app to your phone.  (And a shameless plug, if you don't have an iPhone, I am giving one away that is good only on the U.S. Cellular network.  Just click here to visit the giveaway.)

And back to geocaching. . .

Here are some notable finds of mine in the last week.  Because I don't want to give away TOO much information just in case you are a geocacher near me, I will just describe some of the locations.


1.

My favorite find of the week was on Tuesday.  My boyfriend and I were in a town about 10 miles from here an we saw one located near a cemetery.  I suggested we find it, and we went up the side of  a mountain that reminded me slightly of those pictures I've seen of the mountain paths in China.  Okay, so I'm exagerating, but it was quite the road.  What I didn't realize when we started out that it was at the cemetery where my great-great-grandfather and his wife are buried.  If I had known, I would have brought flowers.  I never had been to where they were buried before.   He was a Union Soldier in the Civil War, born in 1845. 

2. 

One we are still talking about is one someone planted right outside their house.  As we pulled up, someone asked if we were geocaching, and told us we were about 30 feet too far away.  The person who hid the cache was home and waved to us.  And since we were being watched, wouldn't you know it took us a good five minutes to find what should have been seen in seconds.    

3.

I think one of the most interesting things in my area is a rocket.   I can't help but wonder why, but it's there, as is a geocache.

4.

There is an overlook near where I live with a cross.  I have always thought, "How high!  I'd never be able to climb that!"  But I did!  

5. 

This one was sad to find in the condition we found it in.  We think some non-geocachers got into it and left it like this.  But not the way to leave a geocache for others.  I thought it was cool because some school kids left it for others to find.  There is also a neat bush near the geocache, and my boyfriend posed by it.

6.  

A more unusual container I ran across this week was a mailbox.   It was on the side of a building and they received their mail at the road so there is no confusion.

7.  


There was nothing too notable about this one. . . unless you count the beauty of nature.  

For more Quick Takes Friday, visit www.conversiondiary.com and learn more about Jenifer Fulwiler's book  Something Other Than God: How I Passionately Sought Happiness and Accidentally Found Itthat was recently published.

Spring Geocaching in West Virginia

Because of our harsh winters, it's not very feasible to go geocaching in West Virginia during the winter.  Now that spring is here (I hope!), we've caught three geocaches in the last week.  I'm pretty new at caching, only 27 found so far, but I'm enjoying it, it's getting me outdoors and I'm finding some interesting places I didn't know existed.

Here's a few photos of my latest adventures:

This is at the Battle of Rowlesburg Cache.   This is part of the WV Civil War Trail Caches and if you collect 8 stamps, you can turn it in for a special geocoin.   I've always wondered where the Battle of Rowlesburg was.  My great-great-grandfather was to be guarding the railroad, but legend has it that something happened and they allowed the Confederates by and they had to chase them most of the way to Pittsburgh! 

Believe it or not, this is a Cache at a Walmart!   Wal-Mart caches often have a bad rap, but look at the scenery!  Just beautiful. 

This is from the Brown's Park Cache.  I have been past this park hundreds of times, but have never stopped.   It's a fun park, and again, as you can see, a beautiful area!