Total caches published

This morning I noticed an announcement for an event hosted by Minnesota geocachers to commemorate Surfer Joe's 10,000th published geocache. This is a well-deserved honor for my fellow reviewer to the north, especially when you consider that he's been reviewing for just three years.
This got me to thinking about how many geocaches I have published. In a post last September, I wrote that I had published close to 6,000 geocaches in my 5+ years of reviewing. I don't recall how I arrived at that figure, but upon checking this morning, IowaAdmin has officially published 6,491 caches since the summer of 2005, which is as early as the "published" log type goes back. I probably published an additional 1,000 in the 12 months before that. And for a year prior to creating my "IowaAdmin" I.D., I reviewed geocaches in Iowa and Wisconsin using the I.D. "WGA2". Because WGA2 is now owned by a different reviewer, I don't have an accurate way to know exactly what my total is. My best estimate is that it's now around 8,000 caches.

Happy New Year's 2009!

On this first day of 2009, I know that some of my friends celebrated by going geocaching. However, I participated in a different outdoor activity to mark this first day of the year. My daughter and I went kayaking. The weather wasn't great -- 23 degrees, wind gusts up to 30 mph and snow falling -- but the challenging conditions seemed to make it that much more fun. And before you start thinking that we are completely nuts, I should tell you that the lake -- Columbia Lake near Portage, Wis. -- is a cooling lake for a coal-fired power plant so the water temperature is in the 70- to 80-degree range year round. That doesn't make the wind any less bitter when you're putting your kayaks back on top of the car, but it does make the paddling a little more bearable. How ever you celebrated today, I hope you had a good one. Here's to a great 2009! (It's got to be better than 2008, right?)