Ohio calling?

For each of the past two Sundays, our family has traveled to Ohio to do some hiking and, at least for me, a bit of geocaching. We went to Oak Openings Metropark near Toledo each time. The first time was to drop off a trackable called Motorhead Families. The trackable, which I did not take a picture of, had traveled west and southeast but had not really been to Ohio. My wife suggested a larger cache far enough into Ohio so it would travel the state. We parked in a small area across the road from the main part of the park and deposited Motorhead Families in GCZBBM Dancer, a traditional cache.

What was interesting was what I found in the cache — a geocoin minted in 2003. The guest on the Geocache Talk podcast a few weeks ago was Moun10bike, the person who came up with the idea of geocoins. He briefly touched on geocoins near the end of the program. He described the original coin, and the one I found was similar to his description. Had I found an original geocoin? No, it turns out. Geocoins started in 2001. Still, it was cool to find such an old trackable.

Here’s the interesting thing about that geocoin: When I found it, Dancer was just the second geocache it had ever been to, according to its logs. It was placed in the wild in May 2003. A geocacher named Pencil5757 found in June 2003. In May 2020, Pencil5757 wrote a new log for the coin: “Found in an old coat,” and placed it in a TB Hotel in Texas. That same month twosailers retrieved it from the Texas cache and in July placed it in Dancer, from where I retrieved it.

The coin is in a little plastic bag with a handwritten note: “USA GeoCoin You may keep or move along to another cache. Either way, be sure to log on the Travel Bug page at http://www.geocaching.com. Thanks.”

What would you do? It sat idle for 17 years. I felt bad when I found a TB I had had for nearly two years that had been marked missing by the TB’s owner. It’s back in the wild now, retrieved a few days ago from a cache east of Cleveland. Hopefully that one will get plenty of mileage and not go missing again.

Last week, we went back to Oak Openings to do a bit of hiking. Capt. TailWagger played in the water. He decided to walk through the mud rather than use a bridge. He pulled a large limb out a lake and otherwise tried to keep cool.

After a hike around the lake, we head up to a cache called Buddy Holly. The app showed the cache was just 0.5 miles away. That’s as the crow flies. It was probably more like 1.5 miles away by the time we got there. And as luck would have it, I found a TB — Fire Chief Duck #5. He has traveled over 19,000 but has never been to a geocache in Indiana. Hopefully, that will change soon. Trouble is, I have not cached since our trip to Oak Openings. It’s been hot and humid around here in recent days, and I’ve not wanted to do anything.

We made two trips to Oak Openings, and the one cache we did not look for is GC2DBE Ancient Lake, one of the oldest caches in Ohio. (GC31A Shawnee Lookout Cache is generally regarded as the oldest cache in Ohio even though Ancient Lake has an older hidden on date.)

I hope to go back an look for Ancient Lake some time (maybe this fall) when I have a bit more time.

Again, what should I do with this coin? Place it in another cache, where it might go missing for 17 years, or hang on to it and dip in caches along the way?