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.