Groundspeak Portal

I was bored this morning.

 

10 signs that you are into waymarking
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1. You take 4 letters to mail to 4 different post offices to get 4 new "U.S. Post Offices" waymarks.
2. You wonder if the patch of poison oak you wandered through would count as a "Carnivorous Plant Localities". After all, it does seem to be eating your skin alive.
3. You plan your family vacation to around a car trip to visit the Leavenworth Nutcracker, Bata Shoe, and American Sanitary Plumbing "Oddball Museums".
4. You buy a table saw, band saw, drill press, belt sander, and 5 gallons of paint to build a "funny mailbox".
5. You wade out into the water with your handy measuring tape to see if the waterfall is at least 10 feet tall.
6. You visit Disneyland and you take 20 pictures of benchmarks in the ground, 15 pictures of smashed penny machines, 8 Hidden Mickys, and 2 of your family. And the two of your family only becuase they accidently got in the way.
7. Next year's road trip, up the California El Camino Real to waymark/log all of the bells. Might as well hit the missions while we are at it.
8. Suddenly you are a connoisseur of Graffiti.
9. You take your dog to restaurnts just to see...
10. You wonder how much dirt it would take to bury your house to make it an "Earth Home".

10 signs that your spouse is into waymarking
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1. Your spouse never leaves home without the camera and gps.
2. You hear "Look, there's another smashed penny machine. Lets get a picture of this one too!"... for the fifth time today.
3. Your spouse went out and bought some of those funny pink flamingos for the front lawn... 15 feet tall.
4. Your spouse takes you out for a romantic walk into the mountains, on a five mile hike. Suddenly exclaims "Hey, look at that natural arch" and whips out a GPS and camera.
5. Spends a lot of time wandering through cemetaries, both human and pet, looking at the gravestones.
6. Returns from business trips excited about all of the things that he saw, "Painted Fire Hydrants", "Garage Door Art" and "Turtle Crossings".
7. Gets depressed because he found out that "Leaf Peeping" does not mean looking for "Disguised Cell Towers" or "Shoe Trees".
8. Wants to U-Turn and go throught the US-Mexico border a second time because the picture was blurry the first time.
9. Every year, your Birthday gift comes from an "Art-o-Mat".
10. Plans trips around places that have the higest "Waymarks per square mile" factor.

Editing for size:

 

10 signs that you are into waymarking
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3. You plan your family vacation to around a car trip to visit the Leavenworth Nutcracker, Bata Shoe, and American Sanitary Plumbing "Oddball Museums".
4. You buy a table saw, band saw, drill press, belt sander, and 5 gallons of paint to build a "funny mailbox".

#3... emailed my backgammon friend from Mass. saying "Hey check it out... you live about 20 minutes away from the American Sanitary Museum" (whereas I live about a 9 hours away... why did I notice?)

#4... Considered it in the past.

10 signs that your spouse is into waymarking
--------------------------------------------
1. Your spouse never leaves home without the camera and gps.
2. You hear "Look, there's another smashed penny machine. Lets get a picture of this one too!"... for the fifth time today.
4. Your spouse takes you out for a romantic walk into the mountains, on a five mile hike. Suddenly exclaims "Hey, look at that natural arch" and whips out a GPS and camera.
8. Wants to U-Turn and go throught the US-Mexico border a second time because the picture was blurry the first time.
10. Plans trips around places that have the higest "Waymarks per square mile" factor.

#1.... Guilty as charged

#2.... Substitute Tim Horton's for Penny Machine.... that's me!

#4.... She knows better than to be surprised by that

#8....  Quality is important!  I've been trying to talk her into this for the CAN-US border plaque WM that RockHarder made.  NO luck so far!

#10... Not trips for me, I pick different routes to maximize new WM's I can create.

BQ

Hilarious!  This needs to be published somewhere on the site so that everyone sees it, not just forum junkies - maybe on the waymarking news page.  Not really news, but SO funny. 

We're planning a cross-country road trip this coming Summer and waymarking and geocaching are a big part of the planning, so your #3 and #7 were especially funny to me.

Now we need a list for those of us poor souls who have spouses who don't get the appeal of waymarking. 

You know that you are too far into waymarking when you are watching "Pirates of the Caribbean -- Dead Man's Chest" and you spot an enormous, spectacular clock center screen and without thinking say to yourself, That would make a great waymark!

6. You visit Disneyland and you take 20 pictures of benchmarks in the ground, 15 pictures of smashed penny machines, 8 Hidden Mickys, and 2 of your family. And the two of your family only becuase they accidently got in the way.

Change that to Disney World and one of the family, not because she accidently got in the way, but because she was needed for the Stand-by-me waymark.  I did take a few more of her but the majority of my digital photos were for Waymarks and Virtual Geocaches.

You know you are into Waymarking when you have determined the nearest Shoe Tree to your house is 328 miles and you have downloaded the National Register of Historic Places locations for all counties between home and the Shoe Tree.  And now working on the Medal of  Honor graves and any Revolutionary War veterans graves along the route.  But you have also counted up all the extra pairs of shoes at your house and determined it would be cheaper to establish your own Shoe Tree in your own front yard.

rose red:

You know that you are too far into waymarking when you are watching "Pirates of the Caribbean -- Dead Man's Chest" and you spot an enormous, spectacular clock center screen and without thinking say to yourself, That would make a great waymark!

Guilty! 

BruceS:

You know you are into Waymarking when you have determined the nearest Shoe Tree to your house is 328 miles and you have downloaded the National Register of Historic Places locations for all counties between home and the Shoe Tree.

I've had a stack of printouts for my nearest counties for locations on the NRoHP.... and loaded them into my GPS.  Went to DC this weekend and will add a couple, but notice there are 9 pages of listings on the NRoHP site!

Oh, thanks for the big laugh!  Lol.

robert:

I've had a stack of printouts for my nearest counties for locations on the NRoHP.... and loaded them into my GPS.  Went to DC this weekend and will add a couple, but notice there are 9 pages of listings on the NRoHP site!

Nearest counties?!?   I have downloaded all of them in two state (MO and IL) plus a few counties in another state I have to visit regularly.  I go the official site rather than the National Registry site because the official database is more updated and I can get them downloaded into excel and then upload to MapPoint.  Now all I have to do is figure out how to have time to go find them all.

Things I've done that might qualify for this list:

One Sunday after church, I had five cups of coffee.  Nothing too unusual about that, right?  They were at five different Starbucks and I put fifty miles on the odometer to find them.  I did not have a nap that day.

Several inner-city schools are on the National Register of Historic Places.  To get the perfect photograph, at one school I waited until a drug deal was finished, and at another, I waited until the police cars left.

Every week it's a game to see how many waymarks I can log while my daughter is at her dance class.  My record is 9.  I'm the only parent who walks into the dance studio with a GPS, camera, cellphone and PDA.

Some lawyers flew in from New York for a meeting with me and others because of a $30 million lawsuit.  I forgot about the meeting, but got great photos of 3 historic markers because it was very sunny that afternoon.  Nobody noticed that I blew off the meeting.

BruceS:

robert:

I've had a stack of printouts for my nearest counties for locations on the NRoHP.... and loaded them into my GPS.  Went to DC this weekend and will add a couple, but notice there are 9 pages of listings on the NRoHP site!

Nearest counties?!?   I have downloaded all of them in two state (MO and IL) plus a few counties in another state I have to visit regularly.  I go the official site rather than the National Registry site because the official database is more updated and I can get them downloaded into excel and then upload to MapPoint.  Now all I have to do is figure out how to have time to go find them all.

Hmm, hadn't explored the official site much... but now that you mention it I may have to if it's that easy.  I've been copy/pasting them into Mapsource.   Two counties nearest me have some great history, not to mention just a very short bit away is DC so I'm good to go.  Now to find the time!

Q.: How do you know that you spend too much time with "Waymarking"?

A.: When you are being served with papers naming the co-respondent  as "Waymarking" 

10 signs that your spouse is into waymarking

11. Your spouse spends a whole day waymarking with you. The next morning your spouse says, "you can write those waymarks up when its cold and snowy. It's nice weather today, Lets go waymarking".

I'm always glad to see that I'm not totally way out of normal behavior. Erm, normal Groundspeak-related behavior. The strangest thing I've probably done waymarking-related isn't that strange at all. It was a trip to Nahant - I left with a bunch of pages on 47 NGS benchmarks and returned with just a few finds and ten more waymarks. Then again, I don't have access to a car 19 out of 20 times I go wayobenching (geobenchwaying? bwaynge-o-mashing?), so my escapades are somewhat limited.

On our way to somewhere else, but you know how it goes -
I point and holler "Waymark!" the wife groans, "I suppose."
The trip is taking longer, I think it's causing stress;
but she's smiling when i get back in the Jeep, and I can't find my GPS...

I went so far as to volunteer to take my ex-wife to visit her boyfriend who was incarcerated in a prison about 150 miles from my home area. I had never waymarked in that area and knew I had about 4 hours down time, while she was inside, to hit the surrounding area. I spent quite a few evenings looking for waymarks to visit that I needed for the grid. Then hit the NY historical markers website to get the lowdown on where those were as well. Of course I also made up a list of all the U.S. Post Offices along the way.

On another subject for a second, I ran into a very active geocacher recently, and while talking, we got on the subject of what we had been up to lately, I mentioned that I was doing a lot more waymarking that geocaching, only hitting them when they come up as a new hide within a few miles of my area. They said they "looked at the Waymarking website and felt it was too complicated" and that they would rather just stick to geocaching.  I personally like both sites, however, get a lot more enjoyment from finding something interesting to waymark than I do finding a medicine bottle and signing a soggy log. My kids always go with me and they agree 100 percent, especially when they can get into the picture.

Thanks for that laugh! That was great! I read those out to my husband and he "checked" 1 - 8 on the spouse list about me. Makes me feel guilty for not posting waymarks lately. :)

ptcrazy:

On another subject for a second, I ran into a very active geocacher recently, and while talking, we got on the subject of what we had been up to lately, I mentioned that I was doing a lot more waymarking that geocaching, only hitting them when they come up as a new hide within a few miles of my area. They said they "looked at the Waymarking website and felt it was too complicated" and that they would rather just stick to geocaching.

I find I have the best luck with getting geocachers to waymark by specifically asking them to waymark something. For example, one of our local geocachers had a photo of stained glass> i got a beutiful waymark made by someone who really cared about what he was waymarking.

I put out a request on the Michigan geocaching forums for submissions to the Michigan Centennial Farms category. I haven't checked to see if anyone posted, but there was a bit of talk about centennial farms on the board after that.

My next request on the MIGO forum is going to be to ask people that like doing cemetery caches to post the cemetery and the things found in the cemetery while they are out geocaching in cemeteries.

You've learned to take photos without your spouse noticing....along with the stealthy mark on the GPSr.   :)