Thanks everyone! It was a great trip.

We were there for eight days but only cached for five. Most of those caching days were cache in the morning and beach in the after noon. On our best day, we got started around 8:30am in St. Pete and finished up at 8:30pm at night finding 42 caches. That's by far our best day ever. We thought we were going to find our 500th that day, but it got dark and we were at 499. It all worked out, however, because our 500th turned out to also be our first FTF.

We met a few other caching teams on the trails and also made a new friend who I hope will be coming this fall for some Maine caching. Clearwater Rob and I exchanged emails before the trip and he gave me some super suggestions for cache areas, beaches, restaurants etc. We met towards the end of the trip and got along so well that we hung out for a few days together. We spent a lot of time talking about our respective geocaching communities. There aren't a ton of events in that area and most people cache solo or with one other cacher. Surprisingly, there isn't an active website for Pinella's County even though it's so cache dense. I told him he needed to come to Maine to see how it's done! I really talked all you guys up.

This was our first time caching outside of New England and I thought it was really different! It was like being a rock bottom beginner again; my geosense didn't seem to work down there. Oddly enough, it was the full size caches that were almost the hardest to find. You would get to an geozone, but there wouldn't really be one area that stood out from the others and so I'd dig and move things around. Sometimes it would work out, but on several occasions it didn't. It's not strange at all to see a 2:1 ratio of finds to DNFs on plain old regular sized caches. And the Florida hides! Is everyone familiar with these? It's when you stick a micro somewhere in one of the pockets on the trunk of a palm tree. So you could get to a gz and find 20 palm trees each with hundreds of these little pockets and you just start checking every one until you come up with the cache. Even after a week of looking for them, I'm still not really a fan. I mentioned to my new geofriend that most of the caches did not have hints available. He's cached all over and agreed that there usually are no hints posted for caches in the area where we were.

The hard ones aside, we saw some amazing places, views and animals while looking for caches. The weather was in the high 80s every day and since we were on the Gulf of Mexico side, the water at the beach was over 80 degrees as well. The Red Sox won the one game I went to. Picked up close to 20 travelers so look for them in a cache near you.

All in all, a great vaca though I'm glad to be home and caching in Maine where I feel like I have a bit of a clue.