2013 Where Have You Gone?

So.... I am still alive, and I am still interested in continuing with this blog. But I hit a roadblock this year that made it hard to motivate myself to sit down and write anything. Work has been really rewarding but also much busier than normal. That's a good thing, in the past I have become incredibly bored with my career. Back in school I had the same issue, if I didn't feel challenged I could not bring myself to do the tasks I needed to complete. Even to this day trying to get me to do something more than a few days before it is due is like pulling teeth. I do not consider myself a procrastinator, I just like to be challenged.

Caution: Do not wake ZSandmann

Geocaching is still very fun and important to me as my number one hobby, but I have found fewer caches this year than any since I started. I have attended many great events and hung out with my caching friends though. And a good event is more rewarding than a hundred park and grab caches. I'll certainly up my numbers some when we go home for Christmas and with our impending move... More on that in a minute.

I made my 6,000th Geocache "Find" at the Texas Challenge

My biggest regret in terms of geocaching this year is that I didn't get to explore more places in Texas. It's a massive state and our three years here just have not been nearly enough to see all that there is to see. We are going to try and make a trip to El Paso over Thanksgiving, and if we get our passports in time we might even jump over to Mexico just to say we did. The passports are for a cruise we have planned in February for our ten year wedding anniversary. Ten years!  That's just awesome to me.

Pandora: No context to this post, but... this picture, ha!

Ok, so the move huh? I've been transferred to Covington, Louisiana effective January 1. We are excited and also a bit overwhelmed by the process. But in the end it will be great to be back closer to home. Hopefully there will be new adventures to blog about once we are there. Which leads me to my last point, I think I will try and open up this blog to more than geocaching. That gives me more ground to cover and I'll likely get more stories to tell. One such story is the antique dresser set we recently got from geocaching friends of ours. We've been stripping it and sanding and all the fun things to try and get them in shape for a place in our guest bedroom. When that project is completed I'll post it here.

GC62: Tombstone - The oldest active geocache in Texas. I found it earlier this year.

Until then, Cache On!

 

A Fairy hole or a geocache? You decide.

MyLifeOutdoors Guest Post on Geocaching

Whew! We are fresh back in West Texas after a week and a half in Alabama visiting friends and family and celebrating Independence Day. (They allow fireworks over there :P)

I want to thank Steven over at MyLifeOutdoors.com He recently published a guest blog I wrote about Geocaching so if you have spent any time around me and wonder what I am going on and on about check this out.

I'll have two new blogs this week, one about our 4th of July trip and one specifically on our visit to our 61st National Park unit (Vicksburg National Military Park). So stay tuned for those.

New Blog!

I have tried writing blogs before but I always seem to lose interest after a few entries. I'm not sure exactly why that is, I mean, I love the trips we take. Also, we have a lot of family (RE: all our family) out of town that would love to see what we do in our free time. I guess I just enjoy being in the moment more than recounting those moments. Take for example the cruise we took in 2007, the footage is still on our camcorder despite my best attempts to make it into a DVD. But this isn't a very good introduction to a blog is it? Let me start over...

My name is John and my wife, Stephanie, and I have been living in Midland, TX since the beginning of this year (2011). I am a Geologist in the Oil Industry, and was relocated here after five years in Lafayette, Louisiana. We are both from Tuscaloosa, Alabama and have lived in all of the previously mentioned states, plus Colorful Colorado (Fort Collins, oh how we miss it).

I have a few hobbies (my wife would say a few too many) that occupy my free time. The first of which is Geocaching. Geocaching is an outdoor adventure game that uses GPS receivers to find items hidden by other 'cachers' all over the world. There are millions of these 'caches' all over the place. My handle on http://www.geocaching.com is ZSandmann and since June of 2005 I have found over 4,200 caches in many states plus The US Virgin Islands.

My second hobby, and the one my wife actually enjoys, is visiting National Parks. I need to sit down and calculate how many we have been too, but I can guess at 30+ with pretty good confidence. There are over 392 units in the National Park Service currently. We love these treasures of our country, whether it is the active geology of Yellowstone, the temperate vistas of the Smokey Mountains, or a single Cold War era nuclear bunker like Minuteman Missile. Combine this with geocaching and there are bound to be some adventures. I've created this blog just in time for a planned Easter excursion to Guadalupe Mountains and Carlsbad Caverns National Parks this weekend. So stay tuned.