My GPS and Geocaching
- March 02, 2006
- 4 comments
I know I’m about four years too late, but I’ve finally joined in on the Geocaching party. My friend, Mark, got me interested in it. He got a GPS for Christmas and decided he’d give Geocaching a shot. He sounded pretty excited about it, so I joined him on one of his “hunts” and was instantly hooked. It gives me a good reason to get out of the house and get some exercise and fresh air.
I went looking for a decent GPS and settled on the Garmin eTrex Legend C. I found it for a decent price on Amazon. It ended up being about $60 cheaper on Amazon than if I were to buy it at the local outdoors store.
It’s unbelievable how advanced this little thing is. I can select a city anywhere in the States, and it will automatically find the best driving route for me. It will show me all the various stages of the route and alert me when to turn and in which direction. It will tell me how much further I have to go until the next turn and until the final destination. And that’s just routes. It will also keep track of heading, speed, altitude, waypoints, hiking trails, geocaches, etc. And that’s just the basic stuff. There are too many features to list, but suffice to say it’s feature-packed.
Earlier today, I used it to hide my first Geocache about 13 miles from here. It was quite cool to see how accurate it was (down to within 9 ft!) and watch it keep track of the trail I was using.
The spot where I hid my cache isn’t the easiest place to get to. By the time I had hidden it and got out of there, I had scratches all over my legs, a giant cut under my arm and a few holes in my shirt. I painted my cache to look like a rock as well, so you might not see it even if you were right on it. The cache is already listed on the geocaching.com site. It’s called White Cliffs Cache. It will be interesting to see who finds it first.
So, as you can probably tell, I’m hooked on geocaching. I plan on finding three caches this weekend with Mark. It should be fun.
Yeah, it’s pretty nice and I see a lot of them at the local geo-geek gatherings. Yes, we all get together and eat picnic food and go caching together… good times!
The Legend doesn’t have that nice route calculating feature, though – and it lacks a digital compass, so you get to walk in circles a lot! 
That sounds like a lot of fun. I read up on about a year ago and totally forgot. Now I might have to give this a shot.