Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Geocaching: 23 Minutes

I have been looking for a straightforward way of keeping track in which minutes I've found geocaches for the West 76 Degrees Longitude Challenge. When I started keeping track a couple of years ago, I had hit 11 of the 60 minutes, and I made a list in that blog post. As I found more minutes, I had been updating blog posts, but that was not very organized, and didn't keep track when I didn't feel like blogging about every single find.

There is a checker for this challenge, but as I noticed last year, it got confused by the event cache I attended, which doesn't count for this challenge. I actually wrote to the maintainer of that checker about the glitch, but I never heard back.

I had been keeping track of things in a text file, but that was inelegant, as well. It finally hit me that a bookmark list on geocaching.com was the way to go. So I made one.

Here is an excerpt that includes Minutes 47 and 49, which I found this past weekend.

From 40 on up, I'm only missing 48, 51 and 53. I've identified candidates for those in the Greenbelt/Laurel areas. (Weirdly, there are no caches near Bowie in Minute 48.)

Anyway, that gives me 23 minutes total. The three to the west shouldn't be too hard, and I can get most of the thirties in Anne Arundel County. After that, I may stall on this challenge.

Oh, and that checker? It now seems to properly exclude the event cache. Since it list 37 minutes I lack, I have confirmed my list.

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