Hey Geocachers, it’s LANMonkey, I want to let you in on a little secret! Tomorrow we’ll be at the Geocaching Block Party along with the entire cast of Caching in the Northwest! If you’re going to be there, we really want you to come by and say "hi."

In addition, make sure to follow our upcoming episodes as we’re going to be spending the day getting exclusive interviews with Geoaching.com Lackeys and even a little tour of the changes to the offices at Geocaching.com. We’ll take you on some of the Geocaching Adventures available only at this event, and learn what the future holds for those much discussed “lab caches”, the GIFF event, and more.

If you're interested in what Geocaching Adventures (lab cache) caches will be at the Block Party this year, check this link.

So if you want to see more than just what happened, but get some inside scoop and meet the people behind this great hobby/sport of ours, keep your eyes on LANMonkey’s Geocaching Adventures, and your ears on Caching in the Northwest. 

I "Heart" Geocaching, Geocaching Adventures, and Lab Caches

Good morning, and welcome back to our blog, geocachers!
If this is your first visit, welcome, and thanks for checking us out.

I Heart Hucka... Geocaching!

There's been some excitement (in many senses of that word) since news broke last Sunday on The Podcacher Geocaching Podcast and other channels about "I Heart Geocaching" and yesterday (Monday, Feb 3) was the official release of those Geocaching Adventures lab caches for premium members to try out.

In an attempt to help folks understand what this is all about, we've put together a short, information laden video on our vlog and are adding this blog entry to supplement that.

As a starting point, official content from Geocaching.com (the good people formerly known as Groundspeak) has moved from forum chatter to an official and helpful FAQ. That's probably the best place to go, although many of my fellow bloggers, vloggers, and podcasters are all trying to make sure you have the pertinent info at your finger tips!

In that commitment to be helpful, we've created this short video to explain to you in three minutes what lab caches are, how Geocaching Adventures caches work, and what are the "rules" for "I Heart Geocaching" lab caches.

So in short:

• You must be  premium member to participate.
• You get to create 1 "I Heart Geocaching" Geocaching Adventures lab cache
• That cache can only be found once, by one person 
• The Geocaching Adventure is best played in the field on a smart phone
• The 161 metre rule does NOT apply (these don't show up on the maps)

Thirsty for More Geocaching Adventures?

It's really important to Geocaching.com that they get your feedback if you do try this out. There's a few ways to get your constructive feedback to them. They seem to be soliciting this information via replies to this blog posting which first announced the I Heart Geocaching experiment for February. Of course, you can always use the forums also, but I'm in the process of reaching out to the good folks at Geocaching.com to find out how they want to hear your feedback, and share some of the stories they are hearing from you.

Our goal is to record the experience of creating and the subsequent finding of our lab cache (we're going to try it out on a muggle who is curious about geocaching) in an upcoming episode of LMGA, and try to round that out with some feedback from Geocaching.com themselves on how the field beta-test of Geocaching Adventures went.

But most importantly, we want to hear from YOU - are you interested in trying this out? Have you tried creating/finding an "I Heart Geocaching" adventure? What did you think? Would you do it again? Do you have any ideas on how to use these potential new cache types? Write to us via our email, Facebook page (like us! like us!), via Google+, or post comments on our videos. We love hearing from you guys and will be sure to include your feedback as we continue to review "I Heart Geocaching" and other geocaching topics.

Lab Caches Messed With My Stats!

The one criticism we hear most frequently about lab caches is that thy don't count in your stats like any other regular cache type. In fact, between lab caches and US benchmarks, we've found that things can get a bit hairy if you like tracking your stats. And although we're not *just about the numbers* cachers, we do like our stats to be accurate, and that is helpful if you want to tackle challenge caches.

So, the question remains, "if I create/find an "I Heart Geocaching" cache, does it count in my stats?

Well, here's the best answers we could find:

• You will earn a "smilie" for finding any lab cache (you'll get  "lab cache" icon seen above)
• Lab cache finds do not yet affect your statistics page on Geoccaching.com
• Lab cache creation will not yet result in an increase in your "caches placed" statistics
• Geocaching.com is promising to address these concerns in the future

Thanks for sticking through and reading this - we hope it's been helpful, and really appreciate any feedback you may have - did we miss anything important? Did we make any errors? Was this awesome and helpful? Let us know.

And until next time, please remember to cache safely, and cache often!
The LANMonkeys.

LANMonkey Down Under?

Recently, the GeoGearHead's podcast (episode GGH093 - The History of Podcasting) featured a list of active podcasts about geocaching.  This prompted me to check out some of these podcasts I'd not listened to before, and I found some real gems in that list.

I thought it would be cool to hear what cachers in Australia & New Zealand talk about, so I downloaded an episode of the GeoTalk podcast. As it turns out, it happened to be the 100th podcast for that show - that's pretty impressive to get to 100 shows. Congrats Darren on 100 episodes!

In listening to the podcast on my drive home from work, I had a huge surprise when the host, Darren Osborne, started talking about lab caches.  The first blog he referenced in his show was LANMonkey's Geocaching Adventures - you know, this one? That was so amazing and appreciated!  Darren was referencing our "Lab Caches - FYI" episode, as well as bringing in some likely more authoritative sources such as NotAboutTheNumbers and the GroundSpeak forums.

So that's about as close as we'll get to traveling to Australia or New Zealand in the next year or so, but it was awesome to get the reference. So in return, I would encourage any & all of my readers to check out Darren's podcast. It's well put together, and gives a great insight into caching activities down-under. Darren clearly has been caching for a very long time and seems to be a pretty active cacher under the handle "The Spindoctors."

I've also added GeoTalk to my list of "Recommended Reading" over there on the right-hand panel.

If you have any geocaching or outdoor technology related podcasts and/or blogs you'd recommend, please comment or email the LANMonkeys with your suggestions. (PS: remove "NOSPAM" before clicking send on your email.) We look forward to hearing from you on what you read & listen to.

Thanks for reading, and remember to cache safely, and cache often!

Lab Caches - FYI

There's been a lot of discussion - and frankly, a lot of confusion - around Groundspeak's (geocaching.com) introduction of Lab Cache type.  The Lab Cache type was introduced at this years Block Party (August 17th, Seattle WA) with a lot of fanfare but also a lot of confusion.

Prior to the event, Groundspeak let us all know that a "new cache type" was going to be introduced. Hey, they wanted to amp up the excitement and attendance for the Block Party, and that was successful. Subsequently, folks arrived, but then the confusion kicked in. Depending upon where you were when, and to whom you spoke, different messages (unofficial, of course) made their way around about what the deal was with Lab Caches.

Some more experienced 'cachers who'd attended the Block Party previously made assumptions (reasonable ones) based on their past experiences. New cachers tried to grasp the concept and got pieces of it. Other than the "keynote" at the event and a discussion forum posting, there was little official and consistent communication from Groundspeak on the topic.


For example; while at the event I recorded a LMGA episode on the Lab Caches to try and explain what I currently understood - by the time the video was in post production (1 week later) there was more information that I used to make some corrections in the video. Subsequent to that, deeper "research" into the Lab Caches has provided me enough information to write this blog entry - so the first thing to be cognizant of is that this is an evolving concept.

Here are three key things to help you understand Lab Caches.

1. This is a test - this is only a test. Lab Caches are, in essence, a real-world labratory to test out new ideas for geocache types; and the place(s) Groundspeak has decided to use for their "alpha testing" or lab work, are the Mega Events. This means that if you are jonesin' to get a Lab Caches icon in your profile, you'll need to attend a Mega that has announced it will host Lab Caches.

2. They count (sort of).  Lab Caches give you smilies, and count in your over-all cache finds, but

there's a catch, my statistically oriented friends - there are no logs on geocaching.com associated with these caches as they are intended as tests and aren't available after the events. Therefore applications like GSAK won't be able to add them from your "My Finds" pocket query, or from directly querying your account. The work around is to manually create the caches in your GSAK DB as waypoints, and set them to "found" on the date you found them/attended the Mega Event.

3. They're not my type.  Lab Caches aren't one specific type of cache; this is a category for Groundspeak to use to try out all kinds of different ideas (remember "Challenges?") for what might make a new cache type. So each event that has Lab Caches may have something completely different, and Groundspeak is really looking for your feedback on those caches. Attendees from the 2013 Block Party who tried out the "Adventures" Lab Caches were subsequently sent a link to a survey asking for our feedback on these.

As always, I'm really interested in your thoughts & opinions around Lab Caches, and geocaching topics in general, so feel free to post your comments to this blog or to the Lab Cache FYI video on our YouTube channel.

Cache safely, and cache often.