Cache & Coffee – Westerville

As I was leaving work, I remembered that this should be the night for Cache & Coffee – Westerville.   Hadn’t seen the listing for it, but decided to go anyways.

Noone there but me.  Checked gc.com using my phone and didn’t see the event either.  Posted a note on the “2009″ event page when I got home.  Got a reply from BigBill54 that it had been moved to the North Westerville Panera Bread for 2010.

WWFM VI – Child’s Play

2trux & candlelady attended the WWFM VI -- Child’s Play event held in Columbus, Ohio today.

At 1pm, when the whistle was blown, a group of about 75 geocachers participated in a flash mob event at the Easton Town Center.  We gathered at the fountain, joined hands and sang “Ring around the rosie” as we walked around the fountain.  After repeating it for the third time, we “all laid down” for two minutes.  Once the whistle was blown again, we headed off to an area in the parking lot for pictures and to socialize.  We had a good time -- the weather was fantastic!

2009 LoCo NEOGEO NWO Fall Fling

2trux & candlelady attended the 2009 LoCo NEOGEO NWO Fall Fling in Lorain, Ohio today.

GHAGAGAP VIII

2trux & candlelady attended GHAGAFAP VIII – The OctoFab today.

Swing For The Seats

2trux & candlelady attended Serenity Now & Finding Fraggle Rock’s annual “Grand Caching Event”.  This year it was called Swing For The Seats and was held in Independence, Ohio.

nüvi caching – test #2

Erased the caches in the nüvi and reloaded them, using 1000 feet as the alert distance.

Went to brunch today and took the GPSr with us.  Found 3 “park and grab” caches along the way, using just the nüvi to find them.

nüvi caching – test

2trux downloaded his standard pocket query for 500 easy and unfound (by us) caches within a 26 mile radius of our house.  Then used the pilotsnipes macro to upload them into the nüvi.

Mounted the GPSr on the dashboard using Garmin’s portable friction mount (new design), then took off in the vicinity of the cache.  Since we live in the area,  we have a pretty good idea where it’s located.  Once we were within 750 feet (user definable number), an alarm went off, and a popup appeared notifying me that there was a cache nearby.  Selected the cache and let it route me to it.  Parked very close to it (parking lot micro) and found it, without resorting to our handheld unit.

nüvi caching

Have been doing research on “nüvi caching”.  Earlier in the summer, while talking with DRMOO at an dinner event in Ontario, we learned how they used a nüvi to navigate to the cache locations.  Once they got near the cache, they used their handheld unit.  We plan to use our nüvi in the same manner.

To load the caches, we used GSAK with the “pilotsnipes” macro.   The macro creates an export file, which is then used as in input to the Garmin POI loader to upload the data into the nüvi.

One can set a distance alert, so that you receive a beep/visual prompt when you are within X (feet/meters) of the POI (cache).  We also have access to the description, difficult/terrain ratings, hint, and last 5 logs.  While we’re not sure we’ll give up the PDA, it will be nice to have this information readily available to us, before we attempt to go after a cache.

Bought a Garmin nüvi today

On our past couple of visits to Sams Club, 2trux has been eyeballing a Garmin nüvi 255W.  We decided to purchase one today.

Midwest Geobash 2009

Midwest Geobash 2009 [July 25, 2009] – Wauseon, Ohio