We are now geocachers. One of Karen’s friends mentioned geocaching on her website, and she quickly googled it. Within minutes, I had an email telling me she wants to try this thing out. Less than a week later, we have a new handheld GPS unit being mailed to us.
The quick and dirty of it all, is to think of this as a high tech scavenger hunt. You are giving a set of latitude and longitude coordinates, and try to locate that spot. When you get to that point, you look for the hidden box, where you can sign the log and claim you were there.
Today, we set out on our first hunt. We looked around on geocaching.com for a while, and realized there is one right up the street from us. Today we grab the coats, leash up the dog, and convince our niece to come with us. I light a cigar, and we hit the road. As we approach the park we start checking the GPS, and realize it’s not doing what we want. The model we bought, was preloaded with these cache locations. Of course we manage to pick one that ISN’T in our unit. We read the clues and look and look and look. I’m pulling up google maps on my phone, and we just KNOW we are in the right area, but can’t seem to find it. Eventually, we decide to call it off since we can’t ‘prove’ we are even in the right area. If we had a GPS device that would confirm we were in the right area-it might be possible. We walked back home, grabbed another print out, and packed into the truck.
A few minutes later, the TravelingGeoTrio +Niece, were headed to another site. Again, we have the problem with our unit not able to confirm which area to park in (and yes, it did actually matter at a park of this size) and we finally pick one. As we are walking along the trails (going only by the descriptions we found online) I start toying around with the device a bit. Hidden deep in the menus, only found by hitting some weird button combos, I find it. Just what was needed to save us-our actual location. I could go into a lot more detail on how this managed to save us-but I imagine it’s fairly obvious how large of an advantage that was.
We found it. It took some looking, but that’s half the point! After that excitement was over, we drove back to the first spot and gave that another round. Care to guess what happened? Well, I’ll tell you-we found it. Well, sort of. We found the first leg of the hide. At the second spot we are sure we were in the right location-but the actual find evaded us. Don’t worry, we won’t give up. I am going to go back, but next time I will have a flashlight handy.
Till then, I think we figured out how to make our GPS device at least get us by, till we are ready to upgrade to a nice fancy model with a color touch screen. Maybe one with a camera?
