No, I’m not talking about looking for a geocache in a fallen tree. Rather, I’m
talking about one of the new features in CacheStats 3.0, the ability to search your
logs, cache names, or cache descriptions for a particular word or phrase. This is handy when you’re trying to look
up a specific geocache but can only remember part of the name or a few details about the cache such as the name of
the park it was hidden in. But searching for text in your logs can be kind of fun and may reveal interesting facts
about your geocaching adventures. Here are some of the things that I found interesting to search for.
- Weather conditions: rain, pouring, freezing, sunny, beautiful day, windy, cold, hot, humid
- Animals and insects: deer, dog, mosquito, ticks
- Scenery: beautiful, great view, steep
- Cache condition and contents: wet, soaked, open, TB, McToy
- Access mode: bike, hike, jog
So here are some stats from searching our logs. Out of 616 caches found:
- Deer is mentioned 4 times, but mosquito is mentioned 24 times. There are a lot of deer in SE Wisconsin, but the mosquito is the unofficial state bird (as I’m sure it is in many other states as well), so this isn’t surprising.
- Sunny is mentioned 12 times, but rain is mentioned 45 times. But I think most of the mentions of rain are something like “decided to go geocaching after the rain stopped”. (We don’t do much caching in the rain).
- View is mentioned 13 times, dark is mentioned 12 times. I’m guessing that view and dark are never mentioned together in the same log.
- Bike is mentioned 48 times. Geocaching definitely motivates me to get on my bike more than I would otherwise. Jog is mentioned 0 times. I’m clearly not into jogging.
- TFTC is mentioned 483 times. I wonder what it was about the other 133 that we didn’t include it? Oh wait, we mention thanks 79 times, so overall we have thanked almost every cache owner.
So what words or phrases can you think of to search for in your logs? Do your searches reveal anything interesting? Feel free to post your comments here.