Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Kill Bill meets an Elephant

A couple of months ago, I posted about simulacra, the waymark where inanimate objects look like real live things.  Earlier this month, I was out in the desert finding a multi-cache.  The cache was a simple offset, where you find something, or go to a set of coordinates and then walk a certain direction away from those coordinates to find the cache.  I've created a cache similar to that, but I've turned it around and make the finder project a waypoint out and then head to those coordinates to get the final.

The original spot, as stated on the cache page, was at a sleeping elephant.  OK now.  Give me a break.  A sleeping elephant out in the desert of California.  Maybe in Africa, but not here.  Whoa!  Yep, that's a sleeping baby elephant all right.  Besides finding this cache, it also gave me the opportunity to post a waymark in the simulacra category for a sleeping baby elephant.  An added bonus was also posting a waymark in the movie scenes catergory, since the title of the cache is called Kill Bill's Church.  The church across the street from the elephant was used in the Kill Bill movies.

I always enjoy stumbling across stuff like this.  I was actually surprised that neither spot had previously been waymarked.  With the title of the movie as part of the cache description, one would think that some other geocacher would have thought to look on waymarking.com and done a search for it.  I did and found the nearest waymark to be 16.1 miles north of the spot, which gave me a pretty good indication that neither had been waymarked.

The problem, as I see it with waymarking, is you really don't know what's out there until start clicking on links on the geocaching site.  I have never been able to find an easy way to navigate around on the waymarking site.  When I wanted to waymark the piece of the Berlin Wall that's standing at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, I wasn't sure where to start.  I think I started with a search of Berlin Wall.  Eventually, I figured that it would best fit in the Preserved Architectural Remnants and Ruins section.  Once a category is found, it's pretty easy to submit a waymark and the people who help approve the waymarks are pretty good about steering you to the right spot if you haven't quite got it, but I still think it should be easier.

I'm sure I could probably do a lot more waymarking than I do, but I don't know the criteria for each category.  There's almost 1000 different categories of different things, so for the most part, I stick to what interests me and stay there, although the movie category isn't one of the categories I usually end up submitting waymarks to, the Kill Bill Church being the first one.  I just happened to get lucky that I had taken a picture and had all the requisite information for the submission.

I sometimes think that since the removal of virtual caches from Geocaching, Waymarking has become the ugly stepsister of Geocaching.  They're not really sure what to do with it and so it just sits there, getting bigger, but not really improving in any way.  The geocaching site gets makeovers on a regular basis, but I don't see that happening on the Waymarking site.  That's a shame, as I think the site could be better utilized if it were better organized.  But then again, perhaps that's the best it can be, because of the scope of it.

Pictures were taken at or near the following geocache:
KILL BILL'S CHURCH - by fear it caches

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1 comment:

Erika Jean said...

Whoa. that reallly does look like and elephant!