For the past couple of years every so often Jolayne and I would talk about trying out geocaching, but we just never got around to it. This was primarily due to my indecisiveness about picking out a GPS device, pretty much a necessity for the activity (barring a superhuman sense of smell I suppose). I didn’t want to get a low end GPS to use just for geocaching since we’d probably want to get something more geared toward auto navigation at some point anyway. However, those always seemed just too expensive to justify if the main thing they’d be used for was geocaching. So, a couple weeks ago I came to my senses and realized that at this rate we’d finally go geocaching when we were senior citizens and I ordered a Garmin eTrex Legend. It had good reviews and seemed to be a good choice in the middle of the low-end devices with a few more features than the bare minimum without being much more expensive. Plus it came with a data cable which was great since one of the things I really wanted to be able to do was to pull the GPS track logs off of it (I’ll have to do another post about the cool stuff you can do with those).

Since the weather finally got more spring-like today we decided to go out and try to find our first cache, one that was in the Parkville Nature Sanctuary. It seemed like a good choice to start out with since it’s only a couple miles from our house and it’s got some nice, short, not too challenging trails. However, it probably would have been good to check the trail map against the location of the cache first to pick the right trail to start out on. I just kind of picked a trail that I thought would get us to where the GPS was telling us to go, only to realize when we got to the top of a hill that the trail wouldn’t connect to the part of the nature sanctuary that we needed to get to. Oops. After a minor off trail course correction down the side of a hill, across a small creek, and half way up another hill we made it to the waypoint for the cache. After a few minutes of searching, Jolayne discovered it hidden under a tree branch and we opened it up to check out the contents and sign the log book. Our trip back was a lot easier since we took the right trail that would have lead us almost right to the cache in the first place. We had a good time, and there are ton of other caches in the Kansas City area so I’m sure we’ll be out doing it again some time soon.

Comments

Comment by Carrie on 2007-04-16 03:12:16 +0000

Yay for geocaching! I’ve always wanted to try that.

On an unrelated note: My friend Shiv is a DJ for WOXY (they’re an internet radio station, you might have heard of them) but he mentioned today that Yo La Tengo is doing an impromptu Lounge Act for WOXY.

So check this link after 3pm tomorrow for a recording of a live YLT performance and interview:

http://woxy.lala.com/music/loungeacts/

Comment by Will on 2007-04-17 20:45:32 +0000

Thanks for the link, I’ll definitely be grabbing that once it’s up. Can never have too much Yo La Tengo.

Comment by Ash on 2007-04-26 08:04:08 +0000

Whoa! Will, you finally went geocaching. I’m impressed. I remember we talked about it when I first got to Kansas City, and I got all excited.

Hopefully sometime you’ll visit Chicago and we can go urban geocaching.

BTW, There’s a Garmin store on

Michigan avenue, its huge. You must check it out.