NWOG's Winter Featured Cachers are The Pepsis. (March 2011)

1. How did you get your geocaching alias?

   Bill spent most of his working life with the Pepsi Bottling Group so when we were first joining Geocaching.com, without giving it too much thought, the Pepsis came to mind and so it was.

2. What do you do when you're not geocaching?

   We’re retired, healthy and still feeling pretty young (at heart) so we’re busy, busy, busy. We like to spend a few days a week in the summer at our camp at Whitefish Lake. There we enjoy fishing and gardening and try to relax a bit. Bill golfs in the summer and curls in the winter. Jane spends a couple of days a week volunteering with the Hospital Foundation and Alzheimers Thunder Bay. We like road trips and especially the “stop and go” of caching along the way. Our favourite get-away is on a cruise and have gone on many in the last few years. The most fun we have, however, is looking after our first grandchild, Nathan, or as some of you know him D.N.F.

3. When and how did you start geocaching?

   Our son and daughter-in-law, shroomAzoom and Jenn, introduced us to geocaching in the summer of 2007. Our first cache was Forest Walk by Ragbag. It was in a great area and close to home. We stumbled through another 15 or 20 caches in and around the city in the next month or so and then we had a road trip planned to visit friends in Manitoba. We put a few caches on the GPSr, hit the road and we were hooked. We couldn’t believe there were actually geocaches in the farming community of Fisher Branch where they live. They took us to Hecla Island, where they have a cottage, and we found caches there too! This was starting to be fun.

4. What do you like most about geocaching?

   We like the fact that it gets us out and exploring areas we’ve never been to before. Both of us have lived here all of our lives and there are so many great places to enjoy. We like going on a trip and stopping every couple of hours or so to stretch our legs and find a cache. You don’t even have to go too far off the beaten track. We like old cemeteries, interesting buildings, hiking trails and all the places that geocaching has taken us to. We enjoy the hunt to find the cache and the competition of who spots it first.

5. Do you have any geocaching pet-peeves?

   We have one pet-peeve and it is Rocks! We have no luck, at all, when a cache is hidden in a pile of rocks. We spent so much time looking for Rocky Stairs at the university. One day we were near there so, once again, thought we’d give it a try… found it in seconds. Went to log it at home only to find it had been archived!

6. What do you take with you when you go caching?

   We just take the essentials: GPSr, a small pack with pencils, extra log sheets, batteries, small flashlight, tweezers, small swag items, etc. If we are going for more than a couple of hours, we’ll take snacks and water.

7. Have you introduced anyone to geocaching?

   We’ve tried and some seem interested, but no one has really taken it up.

8. Which other geocacher has influenced/stands out to you the most?

   Shroom, of course, has been and is our greatest influence. From getting us started to encouraging us along the way, we’ve had early mornings, long days, great picnics and a lot of fun searching for hidden “treasures”.

9. What is the most interesting place geocaching has taken you?

   That would have been our road trip a couple of years ago to Memphis by way of the Great River Route and Old Highway 61. We went through some very interesting towns, villages and parks and cached all along the way.

10. What has been you most memorable geocaching find (or DNF?)

    It’s really hard to choose one cache, but for Bill the Hike to Sturdee Cove series in Marathon was very memorable. We did it on a beautiful May day and stage 10 was such welcome sight. I guess we generally like to do “series caches”, because Jane’s most memorable was the GeoMonopoly series of 2009. We really looked forward to Friday morning when the cache(s) of the week would be published and then, if we could, we would take off to find it.

11. Which of your hides are you the most pleased with?

    I don’t know if it is that we are “pleased”, but the one that is still getting a lot of action is Deer Haven and most of the logs mention the sighting of deer.

12. What is your closest un-found cache?

    Our closest un-found cache is Little Island by JungleBus. It is only 3 km from our house, and I really do not know why we haven’t gone out for it, but we will.

13. What caches do you have in your sights right now?

    Right now we are looking forward to the caches for SCC-11, unless a road trip comes up in April!