My Geocaching Nickname

Due to a recent request, I thought I'd share the origin of my geocaching nickname, Treelogeo. 


It all started back in my geeky jr. high days in Crawfordsville, Indiana...Every weekend, a bunch of friends and I would get together and play Dungeons & Dragons. We were obsessed! In fact, I don't remember very much about school that didn't involve us role-playing in one form or another. One of my best friends, Tom Cole, started an infamous campaign called "Thieves' World". Without further damaging my "coolness factor", let's just say that Treelo was the name of my wood elf character. He was very roguish and a lot of fun to role-play.


You're probably asking how a 42-year-old man can remember and decide to use Treelo as a part of his nickname for geocaching. This brings up the second part of the name. When my daughter, Ellen, was a toddler, she loved the TV show "Bear in the Big Blue House". Her favorite character, a colorful lemur, stole my elf's name! That was also about the same time I started geocaching (which was introduced to me by my father-in-law, Brad Schuldt).


So, I decided to go with the Treelo part to appease my daughter and I felt that it was fitting since we would be trouncing around in the woods like my wood elf. The geo part of the name is just for the geocaching concept. Thus the name Treelogeo!


Now I've lost all credibility as a "cool dude" and firmly planted myself into official "geekdom"!

Treelo
the original rogue wood elf 
(just an idea of what a wood elf is)

Treelo
from Bear in the Big Blue House

Trying Out the New GPSr with Family & Friends

Since getting the new GPSr on Tuesday (yes, I was slow on getting that last blog post up), I have found 15 new caches. Some of these were found on my own, some with just my son (Ethan), some with Ethan and his friend, Mason, and others yet with the whole family plus some friends that are new to geocaching. By the way, even though I took the friends out when the temperature was less than 40 degrees, I think they're hooked!


With Ethan in Boy Scouts now, he is beginning work on earning his Geocaching Merit Badge. One of the areas that he's learning about (which we have always practiced as a family, but we are discussing more formally now) is CITO...Cache In, Trash Out. CITO means that when you go on a search for a cache, you pick up any trash that you find on the way. What a great way to reinforce Leave No Trace and "leave a place better than you found it"!

Ethan and Thomas (one of the newbies to geocaching)
with a small amount of the trash that was found today!

The official CITO logo

New GPSr...Ordered, Delivered, & Tested

Things are starting to move along...slowly...but I did get my new GPSr in the mail this week! Decided to go with the Garmin 550t. Normally I wouldn't spend this type of money on a GPSr, but with the grant I was able to get one with many more bells and whistles. It has a camera, topographical maps (installed), paperless geocaching feature, three-axes compass, and it's waterproof too!!!


The paperless feature means that I can download the hints, posts, and coordinates all in one touch. The three-axes compass allows me to hold the device any way that I want and it will still show accurately the direction that I am facing plus the direction I need to go. The camera tags every picture that is taken with its latitude and longitude. This is a great feature because I can upload the pictures to this blog and people will know exactly where we were standing! 

Excited with the new purchase

Up close and personal

GeoPatch Designed

With my wife's help, we just finished designing the GeoPatch!! Here it is: 

I plan on attaching the patches to Travel Bugs. I'm going to put two patches on each Travel Bug with the idea that the first K-12 student to find it will take one off and keep it. The other patch will continue to travel with the Bug. I'm not sure exactly what the goal of every Travel Bug will be, but several of them will have a goal of traveling to other educational locations. Eventually some of them will make their way back to a geocache that I plan on hiding here in Indiana before I leave for the trip.

My intent is to add one GeoPatch/Travel Bug per day to a cache that we find. I'm also looking into a new GPSr so that we can have at least two for the family. The one that I am looking at is the Garmin 550 or 550t. This GPSr will allow us to do paperless geocaching as well as take pictures to upload to this blog, geocaching.com, and eventually the website that I am creating as the final part of this project.

One of my early goals was to make sure that I was set up for Wi-Fi even when not in a designated hotspot. We were pleasantly surprised to discover that my wife's phone can act as a mobile hotspot. This will allow us to access the web to search for geocaches even when we're driving or in the middle of nowhere.

The next phase is to start planning the route we will take with greater detail, choose the caches we hope to find (knowing that we'll have to be a bit flexible with this), and book our hotels.