September 17, 1997, I found my first geocache GCPD5C Royal Road Park by Ace226 (traditional cache).
That means today is officially my 5th year geocaching anniversary. So, I decided to go through some of my statistics. These are official ones found through the geocaching.com statistics feature on a cacher's profile page:
Find Rate: 1.8119 caches/day
Longest Streak: 12 consecutive days with finds from 09/22/2007 to 10/03/2007
Longest Slump: 27 consecutive days without a find from 01/10/2010 to 02/06/2010
Best Day: 121 caches in one day on 10/23/2010
Best Month: 192 caches in October of 2010
Best Year: 851 caches in 2010
I currently have found 3,316 caches in 4 provinces, 1 state, and 2 countries. Not too shabby, considering the personal struggles I have gone through the past 3 years (the loss of my father, father in-law, and an 11 year old niece, loss and struggles with work), and the demands of work, my wife finishing her PhD, and raising 8, 5, and 1 year old girls. The stats are obviously fluid. I have a current goal of finding 1,000 geocaches in a calendar year; as a result, both the Find Rate and Best Year stats will change.
I decided to dig deeper and look at some other, more unusual or interesting, stats:
28,877. Those are the number of kilometres I have put on the travel tag attached to my geocaching "murse" (I actually call the trackable "forestfauna's murse"). It has visited 2,025 caches since it was activated on July 29, 2010.
702 and 5,495. Those are number of caches visited, and kilometres hiked, with my hiking stick, Woody, which I turned into a trackable item on October 4, 2009. I made Woody by hand from an interesting young red maple I found growing on a woods road. He has been a constant companion on long hikes.
377. The number of trackables that I have discovered or moved over the past 5 years. I was actually surprised at this number as I had thought it would have been higher.
36. The number of First to Finds (FTFs) I have found.
6 and 3. The number of Travel Bugs (TBs) and geocoins, respectively, that I have released into circulation. Of these, only 2 TBs and 1 geocoin are still in circulation. One TB (our first as a family) was lost when the cache went missing in a flood; the others went into the hands of novice cachers and haven't been seen in 6+ months. What is really cool is that one of the my TBs (travel turtle) is currently visiting the Cook Islands!
1. This is the number of days I have left until I can say that I have logged a cache on every day of the calendar year. I am missing November 24; I started the attempt to fill in my calendar in September of last year, and to my horror, when December came around I realized I had missed a day in November.
So, what I have learned, or gained, over these past 5 years? I believe I have gained a new outlook on my life and a new perspective on who and where I am. I have been more physically active than I was in the 5 years prior to finding geocaching. I have found a hobby that is amazing to share with my young daughters. I am enjoying life more. I have lost friends and gained friends. I've experienced amazing highs and absolutely crushing lows. But through it all, the basics of caching has kept me going forward: going outside, finding a cache, and having fun doing it.
I should note that today is the 1st birthday of my youngest cacher. Complete coincidence, I assure you. I still found time to go out and get a few caches today.
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