Geocaching Goals for 2021

This post will once again, be about geocaching, so if you're not interested, you can stop. Trust me when I say I won't be offended if you leave.

Last week, I reviewed my geocaching accomplishments from the previous year. In this post, I'm going to write about goals that I'm going to set for myself for the upcoming 2021 geocaching year. Nothing really exciting or eye opening, but I want to put them down in writing so to give me something to shoot for. 

1. Have fun - I always put this as my first goal. I'm a firm believer that things that you do in life should be fun, challenging possibly, hard possibly, but they should also be fun. If they're not fun, why do them?

2. Average 100 cache finds per month - Last year, my goal was to find at least 100 per month, and average 125 per month overall. I didn't reach either of those goals, mainly due to the pandemic. I'm not sure how long before I can get in line for a vaccine, which will allow me to take some longer trips again, so I'm committing to just an average of 100 per month. That will put me above last year when I found slightly over 1000 geocaches in the entire year. Granted, the first 500 were found in the first two months, so I was off to a roaring start, but as noted above, the pandemic hit and everything shut down.

3. Hide good quality caches, including more non-traditional caches - This is a continuation of two of my goals from last year. I hid only 5 traditional cache hides last year, but I also hosted 5 events, and hid 6 Multi-caches, 4 Wherigo caches, 8 Mystery caches, and 2 Letterbox Hybrid caches. So I want to continue with this, probably less Mystery caches and more of the other types listed above. Once events are allowed again, I'll start back up hosting them as well, but I suspect that that won't happen until most of us are vaccinated, so perhaps in the fall?

4. Color the grid - If you look at the grid, you'll notice the bottom half of the calendar has all of the dates in a darker shade of green than the top half. There are several challenge caches out there that challenge geocachers to find a certain number of caches on each calendar date, the obvious first one is to find one on every day of the year. The geocaching grid, changes colors at the following number intervals, 1, 11, 26, 100, and I believe 500, but I'm not sure on the last one. Anyway, after the pandemic set in and a lot of outdoor activity was curtailed originally, most of my goals went out the window, so I set up new goals in my mind, one being to get all of the numbers up to at least 26 find per date, since I'd already accomplished 11 per date several years ago. As you can see, I started working on this in earnest sometime in late July. The next date to color is this Friday and Saturday, the 22nd, and 23rd.

This is, in my mind, a challenging goal since there aren't a whole lot of unfound caches close to my house anymore, so I have to travel farther to find caches, either up to the high desert, or east to Redlands, or south into Orange County. I don't mind that, but when there are 4 or 5 days in a row, where I'm going to need to find caches if I want to accomplish this goal, then the logistics of finding areas where there are enough caches to find comes into play. The end of this month, or the months of April and May will be more challenging if I'm going to complete this goal. It's a game though and if I don't complete this goal, it's not the end of the world, but I'd like to complete it on July 28th, which would be the last date I need to color. There are at least two challenge caches south of me that want 20 or 26 finds per date for all calendar dates. I'm close to that, so it would be cool to finish that goal this year, then plan a trip down to San Diego County to get those two caches.

4. Find some caches in new counties - As you can see on the map, I've found at least one cache in every county in California, Arizona, and Nevada, so this will involve some travel, which I'm OK with, once I've gotten vaccinated against COVID-19. One of the goals I had last year was to complete my Jasmer Challenge (finding a cache hidden every month since geocaching started), and to accomplish this, I'll have to travel to Oregon. So I figured, I might be able to accomplish last year's goal and this year's in a similar trip. This is all contingent on getting the vaccine in the near future, but I'm confidant this will happen sooner as opposed to later.

5. Complete at least 2 challenge caches I've already signed - The beauty of challenge caches is you don't have to wait to sign the log until you've accomplished that particular challenge. You sign the logsheet, post a note on the cache page and then work toward that particular goal. Up in Kern County, there is a series of challenge caches, of which at this time, I've only not signed on of them, but I haven't qualified for all of them (got that?), so I can work on any one of those. The easiest to accomplish would be to go up to Kern County and find 17 more caches there. One of the challenges I've signed is to find 500 caches in Kern County. I'm at 483 right now, so once I can travel a little bit more freely, that one should be easy to complete. Then I need to start working on some of the others that I don't qualify for yet.

6. Have fun - As noted last year, and above, I've already posted this, but I just want to reiterate that if it's not fun, then I shouldn't be doing this.

So there you have it, my geocaching goals for this year. Comments on this page are, as always, welcome. Thanks go to my friend Monica, who took the first photo of me finding a cache this summer.

Reviewing accomplishments

This post is all about geocaching, so if you're not interested in geocaching, you can leave.  No, really, I won't be offended.

Last year at this time, I posted my goals that I wanted to accomplish with regards to geocaching in 2020. Just looking back on them, I didn't hit many of the goals, but then again, we all know what hit last year and I'm sure most people who made geocaching goals had the same out come over the course of the year. Still, I wanted to go back and review them to see how close I came and what I want to do in this upcoming year. Obviously, goals are works in progress, so as I reach goals, I'll probably add more goals to the list in the future. I didn't do that last year, mainly because last year was just a plain, weird year.

Goals for last year were:

1. Have fun

2. Find at least 100 caches a month, average 125 a month

3. Hide good quality caches

4. Hide more non-traditional caches

5. Host 12 to 15 geocaching events

6. Attend as many Community Celebration Events as possible

7. Complete the Jasmer Challenge

8. Have fun

So, let's look and see what happened. As you can see, my goals were bookended by the two words, Have Fun. If I'm going to do this, I want it to be fun. And, when I went out it was fun, but it was also different. I've always enjoyed caching with other individuals and outside of the first two months of the year, geocaching was pretty much a solitary event this past year, as it should have been expected.

The second goal was to find 100 caches a month and average 125 per month. Well, you can look at the graph on the right and see that didn't happen. I would be willing to bet that most people's geocaching habits went out the window once the pandemic hit and we went into shelter in place mode, but once we got more information as to how this particular disease works, it became apparent that it was fairly safe to go out and geocache by yourself. I'm not going to keep this goal in place as I have other goals that I want to accomplish that might get in the way of this particular goal. So I guess I'll be playing this one by ear.

Lumping the next three goals together, I partially accomplished that one. Last year, I hid 30 caches, of which only 5 were traditional cache hides. I hosted 5 events before the pandemic hit, so I would have reached that goal easily, and technically, I really did hit that goal, although it won't show on the stat sheet since I've been hosting virtual geocaching coffee events every two weeks since the middle of June.

I also hid 6 multi-caches, 4 Wherigo caches, 8 mystery caches, 2 letterbox hybrids and 2 Adventure Labs. As far as quality, I'll have to leave that up to the finders, but I seem to have seen an uptick in the number of favorite points my caches have been receiving, so I guess that's a good thing.

There literally was only 1 Community Celebration event that I could have attended before everything got shut down (event-wise) at geocaching, and I wasn't comfortable attending at that time, so that goal went by the wayside. I'm sure, eventually, we'll be able to attend events again, once vaccinations take hold and things start to open up again, but I would willing to bet that it probably won't happen until this summer. I'm taking the "Let's be patient" attitude towards events, but once it's safe, I'm hoping that we can have events again. It's fun to get together with other geocachers and just talk about geocaching without having people give you that glazed eye look.

The last goal was to complete my Jasmer Challenge. I feel this one would have been accomplished this year, were it not for the pandemic. For those of you who are still reading along and are not geocachers, the Jasmer Challenge is to find at least one geocache that has been hidden in every month that geocaching has been around, meaning I need to find a geocaching that was hidden in May 2000, June 2000, etc., etc., ad nauseam all the way to the present day. As of this time, the only two months that are still eluding me are June and July 2000. The graph hasn't totally updated as I have already found a cache hidden in January of this year. The plan last year was for a road trip to Oregon. There are caches that were hidden in both those months as well as a cache hidden in May 2000 which I planned to get this past summer. Once again, the pandemic did a number on this goal, but eventually, that goal will fall too, if not this year, then it will become a priority in 2022.

So there you have it. It was fun, some goals were accomplished, while others weren't. In retrospect, I think that because I didn't go out and cache as much, I was able to concentrate more on some of my hides and that, in itself, might have contributed to higher quality caches. I'll need to remember that in the future. I think I'll create a new goal post in the next couple of days. I think if I did it here, the entry would become too large, so it will be better to break it up into two different parts. 

The Magic of the Season

This one is a couple of days late, but it's because of the season. Yeah, that's my story and I'm sticking with it. Anyway, this is for P.J.'s Photo Blogging Challenge and the theme for last month was The Magic of the Season. Here's my take on this theme from Southern California.

1. Santa Bank

I have no idea how old this bank is, but if I were to hazard a guess, I'd say it's close to 80 years old, possibly older. I do know, however, that it sat under our family Christmas tree every year while I was growing up and it also sat under the family Christmas tree while my dad was growing up. About 20 years ago, my parents gifted it to me and it's held the same position of honor under our tree ever since. Eventually, I'll gift this to one of our children and hopefully, they'll continue the tradition.

2. The Christmas "Star"

This year we were able to be witness a "once in a lifetime" convergence of Jupiter and Saturn. My youngest has had an interest in astronomy since a very young age. I brought home a videotape about astronomy when they were 5 and they watched it over and over again. The quote I'll remember from that was at one point, they called me in and said, "Dad! This guy's an astronomer! And he gets paid to do it!"

Career choices change over time, but my youngest has had a large scale telescope since they were 5 or 6, so we hauled that out into the back yard to take a look at Jupiter and Saturn. The photo is exceedingly poor because we didn't have the right set up. I was aiming my iPhone through the eyepiece in the hopes of getting a decent shot and this was as good as it got.

What the photo doesn't show was the magnificence of the rings of Saturn, nor does it show three of the four large Jovian moon we could see as we gazed through the eyepiece. It was an amazing show from the heavens and definitely part of the magic of the season, at least this year.

3. Christmas Tree

The weather was good for a good portion of the month of December which afforded multiple opportunities for hikes in the foothills  north of my house. Apparently, it's a tradition by some of the locals who live close to the trailhead to decorate a tree near the trail.

This was new to me, but I found this Christmas tree to be quite festive. It's not often you stumble across a decorated pine tree on a trail away from suburbia.

4. Nativity Scene

The Claremont United Methodist Church has a nativity scene that fronts Route 66 in our town every year. But it's never a traditional nativity scene. It's always thought provoking, and meant to bring awareness to injustice of some kind. This year, the theme was "Black Lives Matter." You can read their 2020 Nativity Theological Statement here.

5. Snow, like clockwork

Every year, it's always the same thing. Right around Christmas Day, usually a couple of days afterwards, Southern California gets its first winter storm, which always blankets the local mountains. Then, after that storm, everything clears out and it's always gorgeous. ALWAYS! January 1st rings in the new year and we have sunny, mid 60s weather, with the mountains as our background.

And of course, the Rose Parade (with the exception of this year) broadcasts that weather to the entire nation. Only twice in the past 70 years, has it rained on the Rose Parade - both times coincidentally, when the Grand Marshal of the parade was a U.S. Supreme Court Justice (Earl Warren in 1955, and Sandra Day O'Connor in 2006). Usually, it's "sunny and mild" on New Year's Day.

And I blame the Rose Parade for the population in California. And I first have to place a disclaimer here because I'm not a native born Californian, having been born in Indiana. So I'm a transplant as well, but I had no control over that, since I've lived here since I was 3. But I still blame the Rose Parade. Every year, the great weather gets broadcast to the rest of the country and the conversation goes something like this:

"MARTHA! Come look! They're wearing shorts again in Southern California!"

"That's it George. It's time to move to California."

And there's my take on the Magic of the Season. Check out P.J.'s page and read how other people interpreted the theme this past month.