My wife and I had planned a really nice trip to D.C. to see the sites and try out geocaching. We tried to find travel bug hotel pretty close to our house so we could take one down there and drop it off there. We searched for a good hour and a half, mostly running up and down muddy hills but we had no luck. We left a message on geocaching.com saying we thought it got muggled and a few other people agreed and the owner checked, it was muggled and the couple travel bugs there disappeared.
We were much more successful in Washington D.C. We found quite a few virtual caches and it also got us out of our hotel room and away from the normal sites to see some cool statues and other sites around the area. It was really fun but we still hadn’t found any real, physical, cache.
[tags]geocaching[/tags]
Don’t be discouraged! It took me about 2 weeks before I finally got to a decent find rate. I’m looking back at my log, and I only found 5 of my first 12 attempts. There was even one that I went back and looked for 7 times before I finally found it. Of course I only logged one “DNF” (did not find).
It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you get better at as you go along, but it is. Also regarding the cache you were looking for, when you’re first starting out, look at the logs before you give it a try. I would stay away from ones that have a quarter or more of the people unable to find it, or ones that the last 2 people couldn’t find. At the very least to keep you from getting discouraged
I don’t think I ever told you this, but geocaching.com isn’t the only game out there. There is a site called terracaching.com, which lives by the mantra “quality, not quantity.” I haven’t tried any yet, I figured I would when I found all the caches in Baytown. You might also want to search for a local caching message board. I visit the East Side Cachers message board, and a lot of the time they post a link to the cache before it’s even approved on geocaching.com