About Carl of Mocadeki
About Me
I’m Carl, Mocadeki’s Lesser half. I’ve always been into the outdoors and just being outside in general. The unusual thing is I am and have been legally blind since birth. It makes going downhill while hiking a bit more challenging for me due to poor depth perception but I make it work. If it’s really steep and rocky I might just sort of sit down and scoot down.
When Actually searching for a cache at ground zero I may use my vision to see the general area and stand back with my monocular to get ides of potential hiding spots but actually finding the cache often goes by feel. Obviously there’s a lot more poking with sticks in areas where there are poisonous snakes but generally I just reach into tree holes and such. Not recommended but it’s what I do. Only one mishap doing that when I grabbed a wasp on a bridge. It wasn’t too thrilled with me and left me know about it.
Discovering New Places
Geocaching just gives us a way to find new places often that we would not be aware of or not have checked out in the past. Wind cave in Pequea is an example of a place that I had read about but we probably would have never explored without geocaching.
I love solving puzzles but not the look up the answers to questions type. My favorite ones are a new cipher that I hadn’t seen before or some other twist or historical type puzzles Quest for Freedom is one of those that really taught me a lot about local history and when we do physically get out there to find it I won’t be able to help but imagine the history in this area.
In the past I did a decent amount of geocaching with my friend that I met through geocaching but she’s long since retired for caching. I did have lots of fun geocaching with CCCA but I definitely have no interest in geocaching like that again. I’m too old to sleep in the car and live on starbucks. I went with her while Molly was working pretty often and usually when Molly had off we both went. Now It’s always Molly and I
I’m not crazy about parking lot caches and we ignore them 99 percent of the time. Once in a while if we are someplace I’ll check to see if there’s one nearby but I can’t think of the last one we actually bothered to find and sign the log. My best guess would be the one at Lyndon diner.
I’m Not Crazy About Geoart
I’m not crazy about geoart. I guess it would be cool but it’s definitely something that I think is over done. There are a few local ones that I have all the puzzles solved and the corrected coordinates entered and if we want to go that area I see no reason why we wouldn’t consider finding them but we wouldn’t go out of our way to find them. The one exception I can think of is the teal ribbon trail which we’ve started but didn’t finish yet but that’s only because of the reason behind it. We Lost a great geocacher and a great person in general.
souvenirs
I don’t care for the souvenirs that groundspeak added to the site. I don’t think they add anything to geocaching. Besides who needs an excuse to geocaching? The only reason I need to find one is I want to go geocaching which unfortunately time doesn’t permit us to do as often as we’d like. I don’t care to go find a type of geocache that I don’t enjoy as much just for a little icon. Most of the souvenirs are dumb and unrelated to geocaching anyways.
#Geocoins I also liked collecting geocoins. The only reason I stopped is the fact that there just got to be too many of them out there and not many original ones not to mention too many were drifting too far away from geocaching. I’d love to have our own made someday but it’s really not all that high on the priority list for right now. If we ever get one made it will not be for sale. It’d be trade or give only.
Things I’ve done while looking for a geocache
Here’s are some little bits of experiences I’ve had while geocaching. Some funny, some probably not all that smart. Some of them were just awesome rewarding experiences.
- Stood in the water under a bridge in early January looking for a cache. The air temperature was in the 30s that day with some patches of snow on the ground..
- Climbed around on a rusty old railroad trestle looking for a film can. I think its the only film can cache I liked.
- Panic attack on a ledge when my foot slipped. Superballs bounced down the rock face and I couldn’t even enjoy it!
- Hiked up a mountain in a downpour, spent the day hiking around up there with Lynn and waterboy and his wife then hiked back down in a thunderstorm
- Tripped over a log, did a flip. continued running trying to race others to a geocache. Please note I protected the gps and it never even contacted the ground
- Faceplant running across a park in a thunderstorm racing Lynn. She did the same. That grass was like a slip n slide that day
- Stepped in and well learned by the stench of it when I stopped on a bloated deer carcass in Maryland one time. At least it was a roadside cache near a creek so I got to enjoy the icy water while doing the best I could to rinse of the guts and stench from my pants and shoes.