Aces Full of Links

Battleships and Mills

This weekend was our first of the season to spend any significant time geocaching. The weather was amazing through the entire weekend, so it was perfect.

Saturday

Saturday (as usual) we got a late start. My fault, as I did not have any of the usual geocaching software installed on my relatively new machine. Once that chore was over I had the essentials in place. What are the essentials? To me, those would be:

• GSAK (Geocacher’s Swiss Army Knife)
  • Keeps a local database of your found caches. Actually, it’s a local database of any waypoints you want to keep track of. Will download or upload to your GPS at the drop of a hat. Renames the uploaded waypoints based on an abbreviation of the cache name, not the silly, unrecognizable number.
  • Also, can sort by distance. Can print out compressed cache pages. Can translate waypoint files. Can read the Pocket Queries I get for being a member of Geocaching.com.
• QuakeMap — Mapping software/Satellite pix and waypoints manager
  • Sometimes a list of waypoints isn’t enough. Quakemap can take a pocket query and display all of your waypoints on the map (satellite picture). Having a 2D view like this makes cache hunt planning much less haphazard. You can much more easily see which caches are near which other ones, and plan accordingly.

If you’re grabbing one or two caches on a weekend, these tools may not be strictly necessary. But more than that, and they really help with the planning. I’m not one of those 10+ caches in an afternoon people (I could be, but i don’t get up early enough, and the kids get tired!) but I can’t see how you’d even come close to that many caches without this sort of help. Highly recommended, both of these software tools are free to try, but cost money to continue using. Both are well worth the very low cost they ask, especially when you consider that Magellan asks for over $100 for their extremely crappy software which is useless for most things but required if you want to upload maps to your Magellan Meridian Gold. Yes - I actually had to shell out the dough for that one, too, because I didn’t want to rely on the GPS’ built-in maps. Wish it were legal to “go in” on that software halfsies with someone else.

But I digress.

We started with a micro cache at Battleship Cove.

• Battleship Cove.Org
• Google Map of the Area
• Cache Page for GCMCBF
• My log of the cache

This micro was tiny, and a good start. It took some “geocacher radar” to find, which was good. The radar gets a little rusty over the winter here. But it came right back. This micro didn’t take us long.

It was then onward to our second cache of the season.

Perhaps the most notable thing about this cache was the rutty, nearly impassible roads which led to the parking spot.

• Down By The Old Mill Stream (cache page for GCCA1D)
• 
• Google Map of the Area
• My Log of the cache

This was a great cache location. The hike was only a short walk from the car — less than 1/4 mile.

M & K had decided on new cacher nicknames. M is now “Trillian” apparently because she was taken with the commercial for “Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” (I didn’t even know she’s seen the commercial or knew anything about it). Meanwhile, K has dubbed herself “Meeba.” I think it’s short for amoeba.

So, Trillian and Meeba and I came upon an old, stumbling stream among some pretty neat ruins of an old building. There is hardly anything left, so it’s impossible to tell just what the building was by looking at it. But it probably was a house or a mill.

Meeba made the find, as we began wandering around, and she was quite pleased with herself. As well she should be, because none of us were holding back in the search. The girls seem to have even more enthusiasm for geocaching than they did last year. Perhaps the long, tough winter has something to do with that, or perhaps they’ve just gotten a little older and better able to participate.

After making our trades, we hiked back to “Astrid.” Yes, my Jeep now has a name, thanks to the efforts of many people. The girls were originally calling it “Jeff” but as I do not like the name “Jeff” at all, a new name was required. I think Chuck suggested “Astrid” and I think that’s an interesting name. Since the kids seem to want to hear a name more than hearing “the Jeep” I was eager to get that settled and over with.

In any case, we were glad to have the Jeep. We were on roads in this area last year in the Saturn. The roads were murder on the Saturn, and to get down the road at all, I had to swerve madly back and forth. The potholes were easily deeper than the Saturn’s clearance. With all the swerving, I probably only made an effective 3 miles per hour down the road in a Saturn.

This year, we were able to drive more or less straight down the road as the Jeep bucked wildly at times as it negotiated the hills and valleys that ought to have been flat road. We did avoid some of the potholes which were filled with water. There’s no way to see the bottom of some of those and it’s not worth the risk to go barrelling through where you might get your wheel entirely stuck.

We zipped home for our first outdoor cooking of the year as well, rounding out a great “welcome to the light” Saturday. Happy outdoor season has begun.

Sunday we hit 4 more caches, including a famous author’s grave site. That post is coming soon…

Posted by James at April 18, 2005 1:12 AM
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