[Az-Geocaching] Quality of cache trinkets....

[Jim Scotti]

Hey Everyone,
    I've been working on making the rounds and visiting my active cache
containers and have been very disappointed with the quality of the items I'm
finding in my caches as well as in other caches when I go hunting.  If I had
brought a larger selection of items with me yesterday, I think I would have
emptied out all of the junk and put a fresh higher quality set of items in
there.  I might still....  I've seen enough of those little plastic
dinosaurs, bears, armymen, or whatever and 99 cent store plastic keychains.  
I usually bring at the least my favorite combo whistle/thermometer/magnifier
keychains or even a compass or something and often don't even bother taking
anything from the mostly worthless collection of junk in the cache.  If I'm
lucky, I'll find something actually worthwhile or a TB....  Other than team
business cards, I don't remember the last time I found a team signature item
like the TMBH keychains or the old Sand Dollars.  Even a cheap whistle is a
lot better than what I'm seeing in geocaches today.  Is it my imagination or
has the general quality of cache items gone down - or maybe I'm just
comparing the quality I see to what I stocked the cache with originally (you
know, like a sleeve of 3 golf balls for My Blue Heaven to grab, or a Silva
compass or a homemade bag of genuine Hawaiin beach sand...) or even what I
used to find when I was one of the first couple finders of a new geocache (I
think most of us who hide caches tend to stock them well - I found an
outdated old VGA graphics card in a cache once).  Maybe the quality of cache
items has always been that low?
   Sorry to sound so grumpy, but I really was disappointed with the contents
I found last night.  I'd hate to have to restock all of my caches with a
better quality of trinkets.  At least I didn't find any lighters, bullets or
Playboy magazines in it....

Jim.

Jim Scotti
Lunar & Planetary Laboratory
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721 USA                 http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~jscotti/