Geocaching with milesmac

A Big Stick. I'm increasingly of the opinion that a big stick is an essential part of a person's caching gear. Let me share with you some occasions where the The Stick would have been quite helpful.

Go big or go home. I know i'm just a newb at Geocaching, but I'm enjoying it soooo much. I'm not so much interested in trading dollar store items, but I DO like the collectability of cacher's signature items. It's very cool - everything from business cards, to poker chips, to wooden nickles, to minted coins. So I've ordered my own little signature item: the milesmac guitar pick!

They should be here this week or next. I'm pretty excited about it. While I do play guitar, I don't use picks. Still, they are FAR less expensive than any of the other signature items that I've seen; they're light, and small, and would fit into practicallly any cache.
I also ordered an embosser that will impress the message, "milesmac picked this cache. Thanks for the hide!" onto the log pages. A little overboard, perhaps, but that's the way I do things. This summer, I'm planning on distributing all 12 dozen of my pics... hey, wait a minute... that's hardly going to be enough!
Back to the order desk!

I first heard about Geocaching in 2005 while visiting our teacher resource center. I had asked our new and very enthusiastic resource coordinator for information on water systems and North American drainage basins for my grade 8 science unit. He told me about Geocaching. At the time, I would rather have heard about water systems and North American drainage basins, but the thing stayed in my brain.

I am also an avid AirMiles collector and love looking at the rewards online. In the summer of 2006 a new item appeared: the Lowrance iWay 350c. Very cool - a navigation system, GPS, MP3 player and picture viewer with a built-in FM transmitter to send the music on the SD card through to the radio. Neat. Neat. Neat. I got looking up geocaching stuff again. By the beginning of December I had enough AirMiles to get it and it arrived shortly after Christmas.

I already had the cache files ready to load into the 350c and we headed off to Fargo. I drove by lots of the cache locations, but really didn't know what I was looking for. It was literally a couple of months before I found one. Neat. Neat. And again, neat.

I realized that the navigation system would get me close, but wouldn't give me precise directions to the cache. That was when I began the search for an inexpensive handheld unit. Found one on eBay. When will I learn never to buy things on eBay! It was a Garmin 12xl, an older unit, but the price was right. Only $65. yeah... right... then $20 for shipping, then $45 for the serial adapter to hook it up to the computer, then another $30 for the serial to USB adapter. Add $40 for the external antenna I picked up half price at Cabelas in Grand Forks and it's not so much of a deal anymore.

I picked away at about a dozen caches from January to March when I finally got into the swing of things. Started to know what to look for, and where things were. Spring break came and I was in high gear. I went from 11 to 55 caches in just 6 days. I'm thinking this is the kind of thing I could do for a long long time.

The caching community is pretty neat too - pretty focused, and competetive for the First To Find (FTF) certificates but also very supportive and interested in each others' activities. The Manitoba Geocachers Association is a friendly bunch and has an active online community forum as well as an IRC chat channel. While I haven't yet attended any of the in-person functions, I certainly plan to.

Anyway, quite enjoyable. I'm really looking forward to the summer when all of us can get out together in some nice weather and do some "treasure hunting".