A bonanza day for LANMonkey and geolocation games for certain! Today Piggy the Geohound (A.K.A. Jasper) took me to
Delta Watershed Park to find a couple of Geocaching.com geocaches we hadn't found there yet.
After a quick 400+ metres through the interconnecting trails, we managed the finds for both those caches, and were off to a great start to our caching day.
Next up was to switch listing sites as
OpenCaching.US has one of only three listed caches in the Lower Mainland in this very same park. So after WetCoaster's virtual we went, which we could be FTF on. After a minor struggle with coordinates our knowledge of the park and common sense took over and we headed straight for where GZ simply must be!
Arriving at ground zero we filled up with nice, fresh cold water and then searched a bit to find the information. At this point I learned a couple of interesting things about OpenCaching.
- First, I thought that C:Geo on my Blackberry would allow me to use OpenCaching.US as an alternate listing site but it's not an option - only OpenCaching.DE and OpenCaching.PL; I tried to connect to .DE on the chance that it's all the same data with simply different URLs, but I couldn't authenticate my OpenCaching.US account so I'm assuming that's a no. I'd be curious to hear from OpenCaching.US user or moderators if I'm off on the wrong tangent here?
- Second, when completing a virtual on the OpenCaching listing service, you use the "keyword or phrase" that the C/O has you looking for at ground zero as the "password" you need to submit the log. So really, no need to submit an email to the C/O before logging your find. Fascinating. In fact, much more like the newer Geocaching Adventures Lab Caches from Geocaching.com as opposed to how the grandfathered virtual caches at GC.com work.
With our first OpenCaching.US find ever under our belt, and a FTF on it to boot, we decided to check and see if there were any
Munzees in the park - yup, two and neither far from where we were. "Well Piggy, let's get ourselves some Munzees."
We honestly don't play Munzee much so it was a great opportunity to get a couple of those found. So while we tracked down the Munzee locations, we took the opportunity to use
Sighter and place four new sights in the park for the others in the Lower Mainland who've started playing that fun game.
Soon enough we had located those sneaky QR codes and had the first captures on those Munzees - Wow, FTFs in two different geolocation games on one day... sweet!
Time to head back to the car and head home. But wait! Just as we got to the car the phone buzzed a Geocaching.com alert for a
newly published traditional cache in Crescent Beach. Well... it's not *that* far and Piggy and I do have the day off... why not? So in we hopped, loaded the coords in the GPSr and off to Crescent Beach.
When we arrived, we started searching and only moments later hear familiar voices on the other side of the hedge - it was Adroit Seeker and Rain Willowsnap, local cachers I'd crossed paths with earlier this morning. LOL. The three of us searched for a bit when Adroit Seeker came up with the find for a shared FTF. Nice!
After a brief but pleasant chat at ground zero, we all headed off, and Piggy and I headed home to go fire up that BBQ and cook some steak.
"3 FTFs in three different games, and four new sights uploaded. Piggy, do you feel like you earned some steak tonight?"
