Flobbing

Ok - so what is flobbing and what the heck does it have to do with geocaching?. Well here is a series of logs by The Wilkens at one of our series of caches:

Church Farm Trailside
Now this wouldn't normally be a difficult climb at all, but add 92°F temps and Humidity in the 70's and you've got yourself a sweat fest! We signed the log, took nothing left a pint of perspiration.

Church Farm Crest
I had stated the hike weighing in at around 155 pounds. At this point I think I was down to at least 153. Sweating isn't really the best word for it. I don't think there is a word for it at all. Perhaps deluging? Maybe torrential fluid loss? Why don't I just make a word up.I was flobbing, flobbing like a maniac. Not sure if that'll catch on, but nevertheless I'll try it out :)

Church Farm Bird Sanctuary
As if sweating out all of my free fluid wasn't enough, the mosquitoes were determined to make a forcible withdrawal on my other reserves. Those little buggers ganged up on me! One would buzz around my ear while a pack of twelve of them snuck down to my elbows and bit the crap out of me!

Church Farm Wishing Well
Weak from blood loss, dizzy from sweating more than Elvis on a treadmill we plodded on to this next cache. The trails were nice, I think. I was getting tunnel vision. I couldn't drink water fast enough [:)]. I looked like a lawn sprinkler; seat was actually shooting out of me. It hit Skippermark in the eye once; let's just say he wasn't happy about it. Every time I turned around, people ducked.

Church Farm Lone Birch
At this stage of the game, Skippermark's son was using me as the source for his slip and slide. Bailey was licking me and the adults were staying the heck away from me. I jumped in a puddle to dry off. I think I'll stick to winter caching from now on. Not only that, I was now the pied piper of biting insects.

Church Farm Erratic
As I dripped my way along to the next cache, I tried to get ahead of the pack so as not to sweat on them anymore. This extra effort was directly proportional to the additional sweat produced. A very cool rock in the middle of the woods as I recall. It was at this point that I was bitten 4 times on the face by a squad of ninja mosquitoes. I hope they don't hang around there for the next cacher. I think I got a couple of them as there was, as Pam pointed out, blood running down my face! Wow, what an experience [:)]

Church Farm Bonus Cache
The end of our adventure today and I was overjoyed that it was at least in the vicinity of some pine trees. The bugs died down and the shade allowed me to regain some fluids without having them immediately squirt out of every pore in my body. A very nice hide and a fitting end to a good solid series.

Thanks for all the fun.


As you can see The Wilkens had a lot of fun finding these caches. We also had fun reading the fantastic logs. Geocaching is all about fun. It is not about just finding caches and adding to your find count.

Moral of the story. Write a good log so that the hiders of the caches can join in the fun that you had in finding the caches.

And most of all -- Don't take this hobby too seriously -- Have Fun!!
Mike and Barb

PS - Wonder how long before Flobbing shows up in dictionary?

Thanks to geocaching you can see some cool sites

In past years I have been somewhat of a workacholic. This year I have decided to do a bit more vacationing. We took a week and went to Maine where a friend has a cottage. After a few days at the cottage doing chores (neither me or Barb are much good at doing nothing) we did some geocaching. We saw some wonderful places.This past week we took a road trip to Wisconsin to have Christmas in July at Barb's parents house. We were excited to add a few extra states to our list. We added Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. Again we saw some cool sites while caching. We even got to meet a geocacher finding his very first cache in Indiana. While in Michigan we visited some good friends of ours and introduced them to geocaching. It was really cool as we brought them to some waterfalls that they had never been to. We kidded them that they needed some "out of towners" to show them the local sites. We then headed across the UP of Michigan and was always close to Lake Michigan. Stopped at a few caches along the way placed at historic sites or within great views of the lake. There were many caches in rest areas in Pennsylvania that were a godsend as every now and then you need a break to wake up and stretch your legs. All in all we had a great time visiting friends and family and seeing some great sites. We would like to thank the geocaching community for hiding caches for us to find and show us some of the better spots along our route.

Review of CacheStats

Sorry to not have a post in over a month. Summer is not prime computer time. Chores, hiding many caches (we now have over 100 hides) and a vacation (found 105 caches) took priority of my free time.

I stumbled across a program called CacheStats written by abcdmCachers. . As many of you know I am a bit of statistics freak. This program is really cool. If you are a premium member you can do a pocket query on your finds. Once you import the unzipped GPX file it displays a bunch of interesting stats. It includes most finds in day, most finds in a month, average terrain and difficulty ratings, dates of each milestone, find rates by year, projections for the amount of finds to expect in the coming year based on your find rate, and the states and countries you have cached in. It also allows you to tag your favorite and FTF caches. You can even inport HTML into your profile although we haven't tried that yet. Best news. This is only version 1.0. And even better news -- it is free.

We have to thank abcdmCachers for this cool software.