Category: Opencaching.us

What is a Cache-Advance Cache Crate?

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CacheCrateColor_200One of the generous prizes donated for our 5th Anniversary Contest is a Cache Crate from one of the longest tenured Geocaching retailers in the world, Cache-Advance. What exactly is a Cache Crate? It could be described as a membership based service where you receive a surprise box full of Geocaching and outdoor gear delivered to your house. Cache-Advance themselves describe it as “just like finding an awesome regular sized cache filled with amazing swag”.

Membership Levels:

Cache Crates ship out on a monthly basis, although they do offer some memberships where you don’t receive them every single month. There are 6 levels of membership:

  • 3 Month gift membership for $60 ($20/month)
  • Annual membership for $228 ($19/month)
  • 6 Month membership for $120 ($20/month)
  • Monthly membership ($22/month)
  • Every other month membership ($23/every other month)
  • Quarterly membership (a Cache Crate every 3rd month) ($24/month)

Cache Crate unboxing gone viral on YouTube:

A Google search of “cache crate unboxing” shows at least 4 Geocaching Vloggers have made videos of them opening up a Cache Crate. Here we have the June 2015 unboxing by one time OCNA guest blogger The Geocaching Doc. This is the same video shown on the Cache Crate Membership page on Cache-Advance’s website. Do check that out, and consider buying a membership for yourself or a gift membership for someone else. We thank Lisa from Cache-Advance for the donation for our contest.


P.S. What happened to The Geocaching Doc on this blog?

Oh, about 3 months ago, YouTube forced developers to migrate to the latest version of their API. You might remember in 2014 a similar directive issued by Google Maps threw ours (as well as fellow alternative site Terracaching.com’s) cache maps into a tizzy. Both have since been fixed. The plug in that posted The GCDoc’s latest video on this blog was not compliant. We did hear of a small coding fix, and it worked for about a month, then abruptly stopped working again. We are looking at other plug in options, and are confident we can come up with something.

OCNA Admin DudleyGrunt on the Cache and Release Geocaching Podcast

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candrOCNA Admin DudleyGrunt appeared on yet another Geocaching Podcast on Sunday August 9th, 2015: The Cache and Release Geocaching podcast. DG was mainly on the show to talk about our website and our 5th anniversary contest, but he and host Michael Miller discuss several topics, including recent Geocaching News, and Geowoodstock. The Cache and Release Geocaching Podcast is recorded on Sunday Nights. It was created with a very simple goal in mind: To inform and entertain. The show, produced weekly, will keep listeners up to date with the latest geocaching news and related subjects. Listeners will also have the opportunity to listen to interviews that broaden the scope of the show by bringing in other geocachers and pundits. In addition, the Cache and Release Podcast seeks to entertain listeners with topical and off topical commentary and subject matter. The end result should be a show that is well produced and considered a leader not only within the geocaching community, but also within the podcasting community.

You can listen to the audio version on their website, or subscribe to it through iTunes, RSS, or Android, watch the shows on YouTube, and check them out on FaceBook, Google+, Pinterest and Twitter.


The OpenCaching NA 5th Anniversary contest: everything you need to know

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Contest starts in three days!

The Official entry forms for our August 2015 5th Anniversary Contest are now available! Powered by Google Forms, you can view it here. This form is printer friendly. Feel free to print one out to fill out by hand for reference as you go along in the contest. And we have also stated that we will accept legible, handwritten and scanned entry forms emailed to us at the conclusion of the contest. You can also submit your form to us now, and save it for later editing as you go along online! The process for doing so is admittedly not as simple as we would like, but we will outline it below.

Submitting and saving the form online for later editing:

Here are instructions for doing so:
Fill out the three mandatory fields at the top of the entry form (Player name, Your email address, and “Enter the total raw score you are claiming for the month”). You’ll have to just “make up” a raw score the first time. Scroll down to the bottom of the form and hit the Submit button. You should now see this page below on your web browser of choice:

2015example

Next, click on the “Edit your response” link, as shown above. After that, bookmark the page you are taken to! You should now be able to update your entry form from that bookmarked page as you go throughout the month. Be sure to hit Submit at the bottom every time you edit it.

Sponsors/Prizes Page released also.

We have completed the preliminary OpenCaching NA 5th Anniversary contest Sponsors/Prizes page as well, found at https://www.opencaching.us/articles.php?page=2015prizes. Note from that page that our prizes are not finalized yet, and probably won’t be until sometime in August during the contest. That page is the place to look for finalized prize info. Check back often!

The only two links you’ll need:

We’ve had two blog posts releasing info and details about the contest, as well as releasing some via social media outlets, and via the “news” section on the main page of our website. Everything you need or need to know for the contest can now be found on two pages on our website:

Are you playing? Let us know, and let’s talk about it!

The way this contest is set up, we won’t really know exactly how many people are playing until it’s over. We do expect some people to follow the “not as easy as we would like” instructions to fill out their entry forms early, and keep their scores on the fly, but certainly not everyone. So we invite anyone who is playing to tell us about it at a thread we’ve created under the Geocaching sub forum in our forums. We admit that like many old fashioned forums on the internet that ours isn’t very active (they say Facebook is to blame), but hopefully this will be an active thread. Enter the contest, and please consider chiming in over there. Good luck, and we hope to hear from you!

The OpenCaching NA 5th Anniversary contest!

OpenCaching North America 3 Comments

Coming in August! Win prizes!

Open Caching Logo V2BTo celebrate our 5th anniversary (Aug. 18th) and the month of International Geocaching Day (Aug. 15th), we will be running a contest for the entire month of August, which encourages people to find and hide caches on our site.  This contest is inspired by our first “Diversified Cacher Contest” in 2014, two similar “non-official” contests run in the past by one of our admins, NativTxn, as well as a local “alternative to the frog” contest run by Termite Hunter during May and June 2014 at the Greater Charlotte Geocaching Club website. We have prizes to give away! Want to play? Read on.

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OCNA Admin DudleyGrunt on the Caching in the NW Podcast

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CNW_Libsyn_1400x1400We threatened to upload this Podcast over the long holiday weekend, but got a little busy, and didn’t really have a new post in our back pocket. So here we have Caching in the NW episode 101, titled “OpenCaching North America”, which was originally streamed live on Thursday, July 2nd, 2015, and featured our longest tenured admim DudleyGrunt. The Caching in the NW Podcast, the only Podcast dedicated to Geocaching in the Pacific Northwest, is streamed live on Thursdays at 9:00 PM Pacific Standard Time, hosted by The Bad Cop, along with Witz End and LANMonkey. You can hear the show at their website, watch the audio version on their YouTube channel, or find them on Facebook or Google+.


Coming soon from OCNA!

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coming-soon-yield-mdAs July is now upon us, we have a few announcements of future happenings at OpenCaching North America. One of them happening very, very soon. OCNA Admin DudleyGrunt will be the featured guest on Caching in the NorthWest Podcast, episode 101, which will be recorded, oh, about an hour after this post, at 9:00 PM Pacific Standard Time on July 2nd, 2015. We will post that here on our blog, either in the audio or video version, this weekend. We also have two big announcements regarding our website:

OCentric Contest:

We will be running a contest the entire month of August, 2015, that is concentrated on finding and hiding caches on our website. This is as opposed to other contests we have run in the past, which were geared towards using all the alternative Geocaching websites, as well as other GPS enabled games. This is because we will be celebrating our 5th anniversary in August 2015! Want details and updates? This blog is the first place to look.

5th Anniversary Pathtags sneak peak:

OCNA, originally known as only OpenCaching.us, was publicly launched on August 18th, 2010. Well happy upcoming 5th birthday to us! We will have 5th Anniversary Pathtags made up, as well as a free Pathtag back anyone can use for their personal tag. Here is an exclusive sneak peak at both, subject to change, although we don’t think very much. A few minor tweaks, at most 🙂

white hank

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