Continuing Education

For a very long time, I’ve had a little problem.  When caches drop, I would only be informed if they were the basic physical ones (Traditional, Mystery, Letterbox, etc.) but never the other types (Events, CITOs, Earthcaches, etc.).  I always thought that it was a huge missed opportunity to not notify cachers, especially when it came to Events, which a lot of cachers don’t know about if they only use apps (if they see one on the map, they might not get back to it or remember when it is, which is more easily handled if they look at the calendar on their main profile, which they might not do because apps…).  After all these years, I put the question to a wider forum than my local caching community and learned about something wonderous.  For years, I though something like this would/should be under Settings > Email Preferences.  Someone pointed me to a new feature I hadn’t paid attention to before, Set Up Notifications!  It’s a Premium Tool, but when you enter it, you can (as the name so aptly suggest) set up notifications for all the cache types!  Why had nobody told me about this before?  I immediately set notifications up for the common and uncommon cache types (I divide types into four categories: common, uncommon, rare, and unique.  I think you can pretty much suss out which types go in each category), leaving the other categories alone (if a Mega is happening within a hundred miles of me, I’m pretty sure I’m going to know about it).  I also immediately started wondering why Events are not one of the default cache types that are automatically notified.  I’ve always thought that the transmission of information is, after fostering camaraderie and esprit de corps, perhaps the most important function of Events.  Look, how many of you were just idly looking at a map of the geocaching world and accidentally stumbled upon Mingo?  Who got a random hair somewhere and though to wonder about their state’s oldest cache?  Or considered Jasmer?  Or ever heard of a loop?  How do people learn about Project-GC or GSAK?  A lot of Youtube videos (and there are a lot of options out there) show you the fun and adventure of caching, but how many of them are more educational than entertaining?  There’s always new stuff to learn.  I’ve been doing this a long-ish time, and I only just found the answer to one of my most vexing questions.  I’m not saying you need to be able to write a dissertation on global positioning systems to enjoy the hunt and the find, but it doesn’t hurt to have expanded horizons.  You don’t have to go spelunking with Plato to see and learn more of what’s going on.  The more you know…