Episode: 673
Title: HPR0673: droops returns to geocaching
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0673/hpr0673.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 00:43:34

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Welcome to Hacker Public Radio.
This is Drupes and today I'm going to be talking about geocaching.
Quick little intro for geocaching.
People find interesting spots, hopefully.
And they hide something there, somewhere, some spot on the world somewhere.
And then they publish the GPS coordinates for it.
Most people publish them at geocaching.com, which is the main site, but there's of course
alternatives.
And other people look at these coordinates and go find them and say, oh, this is a neat
spot.
Hey, this is a horrible place.
Why did you bring me here?
Or hey, I've now found 30,000 of these things.
I'm awesome.
And anyway, that's geocaching.
All you need is a GPS or a phone with a GPS and a free account geocaching.com or any
other ones and go around looking for stuff.
Now I used to really, really into geocaching.
And I've been away from this sport activity, whatever, for a long time.
And I've tried to get back into it recently and I've been kind of sad about one of the
directions sports been going.
Now, when I started, I lived at North Mississippi and there was a, we were near Nashville,
somewhat.
And everyone, the geocast around me called Nashville, Cashville, because there was an overabundance
of caches.
They go, oh, here's a street corner.
You've made it to it.
Awesome.
Here's a hidden thing here.
Oh, it's another street corner.
Here's a hidden thing.
Good job.
And it really took a lot of the adventure or the exploration or the, hey, this is something
neat away from it.
Now coming back into geocaching, everywhere I look seems to be more like cashville than
I remember.
There's a lot of what are called parking grabs.
And it's not, it's not my enjoyment of it.
Like I can totally, anyway, like I literally had to park the day at a dumpster to, to hit
these parking grabs.
And the little cash page said, park at the dumpsters.
And why would I want to look at dumpsters when I'm trying to see something neat.
Now it's like there's no thought put into where they're hiding these things.
They're just after the numbers.
So in typical droops fashion, I'm going to attempt to set an example in geocaching with
my hides.
And I really, really like the adventure or the journey to the cache.
And then hopefully the beauty of the destination.
And not a big fan of a simple cache under a pile of sticks at the base of a tree or a
micro, which is like a little bitty one, hidden just in your own place with like no real significance.
Man, I'm a jerk.
So anyway, going over a few caches that I had disappointed me recently and talking about
a few that John Dock and I just hid.
I'm going to try to say everything the actual names of caches to keep the mystery alive.
And I'm going to, I'm going to pick up my handwriting.
I'm going to point out a few tips that have improved geocaching since I started.
Now John Dock and I spent the day caching the other day and we found five caches and hit a few.
And the ones we found were very disappointing.
Now I have children and I involve them in geocaching.
So I understand that like children caches have a big place in caching and I also understand
that some people are less than mobile when they geocaching and they're out there.
But neither of those are excuses for really the proliferation of spam caches and this
increasing frequency of them.
Now the one we were looking for, we're in a national forest.
And if you check out the video, oh yeah, hey, this is an enhanced episode of HPR.
If you go to hackupublicradio.org slash droops, you can see a video of John Dock and I doing this.
So check that out and enhanced, woohoo.
The four caches that we found in the national park were really spammy.
The first one was right off of parking lot and you know parking lots are pretty and you know whatever.
And it was kind of shallow in the woods.
So you're thinking oh it might be just for some kish kids, whatever, but they were bunch
of briars.
So I had to go to like five feet of briars to get to this cache and kid friendly caches
don't have briars.
It was just hey, come to this parking lot in the national forest.
And the second one was at release of cool abandoned buildings that the college I went to
had like a forestry camp in the 1920s there and but this cache was five feet from the
road and just like the first one under some sticks by tree.
Not like go look at these cool buildings.
It's like park here by these cool buildings and then don't really leave your car for.
Number three was a small plastic container on a bridge railing at a popular fishing spot.
So not only did I get to go out to the national forest and smell about your car fumes from
people that were parking and fishing, there were trails that like branched out to explore
the woods in the area and no no this was just hidden in a railing.
It wasn't like painted like the railing or like cleverly hidden like you could just walk
up and see it.
So that was great.
The last one the national forest was at the old entrance to the forest and the GPS was
leading me away from the little rock marker structure that you know that marks the entrance
and I said to John Dogg you know I'm surprised they didn't just like hide on right there on
that little rock thing and right then he's like oh here it is.
They had just set a cache on a rock wall.
So I could drive up to the entrance, drive up to some abandoned buildings, drive to a parking
lot and then drive to a bridge and that was geocaching in the national forest when I
could have been like walking or exploring or like seeing stuff.
You know there's like massive alligators out there and there's lots of water and there's
hiking trails but no no no we'll just drive too much of things.
That's awesome.
The last one we found was actually on the way home and it was hooked to a tree outside
an abandoned bar that was built like the 80s near a cross road in a little small town
and there was a bunch of trash I don't know it was it's not exciting again it was right
off the road too.
So we spent the the whole day at the national forest we explored the lake and we explored
the bayou which is like a creek or a river, this little stream thing that you can put
a boat in coming off the lake and we found a seldomly marked lake out in the woods.
I'll say it's seldomly marked like most maps don't have it and my GPS doesn't have it
and it's got the fancy mapping thing with the topos but we found this lake and it was
awesome and we didn't get through half of the national forest at all even like the section
that we ran.
There's the national forest there's other parts that are much bigger.
So we found like a peninsula that would be a sweet campsite, had a bunch of washed away
duck decoys which is kind of cool, have a duck decoy collection now, we found a swing
over by you, found a sweet bridge over the dam that you could walk across and like literally
feel the dam water, we saw tons of ducks that you could like almost catch, we did some
walk and we did some kayaking, it was great.
So like beautiful and creative hides or what I try to think about when I think about geocache
and like one of my favorite caches has a micro which is small and in the first stage
it has a multi-cache as more than one stage and you open up those small micro and has
these cryptic numbers and eventually you figure out that this looks like a book number
from like the library and so you go into the library nearby it's in this one's hidden
at the college and then you find, I think that's called the Dewey Decimal System, you find
a false book that's hidden in this library and that's the log for the cache and like that's
pretty crazy, crazy, I liked it, I used to have one, it was pirate themed and you would
actually find a specially made map that I made like ten of whatever, some number, to attempt
to find the cache, the coordinates that were listed on the site just took you to a spot
on the map and if you didn't have one of these maps you can find this cache and it was
awesome, like we covered the ground underneath the cache with seashells when you got close
you could tell and people would come to my house and be like, hey can I have a map, we
have to go find one or if they were really cool I would make them take like this old sword
that I had and they had to take pictures the whole way of them, I can like awesome people
looking for this pirate geocache and you could walk to it kind of, you could, the best
way to just walk to creek to get to it or you could boat to it and I don't know just
sometimes I have a story so it's not just like, like I'm looking back at all these caches
that I found and a lot of them I just don't remember a bit of them and then I look and
it was, I didn't write a very interesting log for them but then the ones that I remember
I wrote like this massive log talking about how great they were, which they were all great
kind of like HPR every episode should be something good because it's something some
I thought was really cool so like when hiding a cache I like to spend a lot of time
research and location and I use a topo map to find something that may be interesting
and I market on my GPS and then I go find that spot and I usually find a bunch of
maybe's before I go explore and if it's a super cool spot that I find I might not have
a cache there or might come back and be all creative in that spot I found a like I said
I found a bunch of old lost duck decoys and I'm planning on incorporating them into
a new nighttime cache where you have to follow the little tax through the woods and then
maybe we have a bunch of duck heads hanging on a tree I don't know most spots that I find
aren't cache worthy and I don't hide something there but hopefully I find something that
is and I can do something cool now getting coordinates for one of these points of interest
that I find on toggle maps is super easy you can use this internet thing if you go to
my topo dot com slash maps and this will be in the show notes and you select the types
of coordinates you want to use like the bottom of the map you just mouse over where you
think is the point of interest and click on it and it'll totally tell you here's how
you get there or the coordinates to it and this side has a ton of free topo map data.
Now the USGS offers free PDF versions of all their topo maps the big quad maps that you
see if you go to store.usgs.gov and then click on map locator and let's store fool you
select a quad area and then it's like here's the so in the the droops area map and then
they'll say do you want to buy it or do you want to PDF of it and printing them yourself
is insanely expensive because they're such big maps and you have to have fancy equipment
or take them somewhere but maybe look out maybe just look at them on your computer.
So onward down let's see here's something that's new about geocaching I really like.
Hey I'm grumpy and today I'm going to talk about something nice.
So geocaching dot com is still stuck in a web window and put a world with a web 2.0
idea like their users create all their content and that's what they sell and yet you can't
like friend people or you can't like I don't know it's it's just bad so anyway the only way
you can point out currently the cash sucks is if you leave comments saying that and this is
against the be nice on the internet rules that that will result in a breakdown of society
if you break so you've hired us really crappy cash and I find it I'm like why did you make
me walk if I frickin 10 feet of briars from this ugly parking lot to find a little plastic
box that you obviously took no time in thinking about hiding do I write that no because then
those people will be like oh droops he's such a jerk you know I'm going to go trash
his stuff or call him bad names on the internet if you really take offense to this so you
just like log that thanks for the cash yada yada yada and if it's a good one you're like
oh this was so awesome we had the best time here's the pictures we took doing it so I can't
really say anything negative about it it's just like lack of talking about it that says
hey your cash sucks so there's a grease monkey script that of course fixes this problem which
allows anonymous cash rankings which really is a killer feature to me as a grumpy old guy
so of course you can go for that maybe I'll have the Joe notes so I have a video at Hacker
Public Radio slash or dot org slash droops of John doc and I hiding some caches that he and I
went ahead and join the area in our kayaks and if people are interested in me containing this I'd
love to make more geocaching videos I have a lot of special gear just for geocaching because I'm
totally a gear guy and usually other nerds are interested in sharing gear so I'm working on a
children's cash based on the basilisaurus which is a fossilized whale that's not only really
scary looking but was discovered near where I live and I'd like to make a hpr episode about that
um the cash as we hid one of them is on an island according to the maps but it's it's not an
island as when we went there we got to bust a bunch of ice to go through it to go over the island
and hide the cash and the other ones that that hidden lake that people have seen those pictures now
on Facebook and they're like ah that lake so awesome I'm gonna go fishing there and we met some
crazy old people that were looking for eagles and alligators and which is odd combination and they
didn't believe that we'd actually made it to that lake apparently it's it's mythological lake anyway
kind of neat stuff it's been several weeks as I hid these no one's found them maybe no one wants
to find my caches I think are good because they're like we're all in it for the numbers or we only like
really easy caches that you don't actually have to be able to like walk to find I don't know
but uh anyway this is the hopefully the first enhanced episode of hpr and the video is at
Haggar Public Radio dot org slash troops and I have been troops and I'm going to say troops troops
troops and good night
thank you for listening to Haggar Public Radio hpr is sponsored by tarot.net so head on over to
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