CachingCentral

BY SUSAN O’LEARY

Valparaiso University professor Richard Freeman leads a double life.

A soft-spoken electrical and computer engineering professor by day, Freeman and his wife, Tracy, transform into avid treasure-hunters in their free time.

The Freemans have joined thousands around the world who enjoy geocaching.

“It’s addictive,” he said, grinning and rubbing his hands together. “It’s not as easy as it sounds. We once spent two hours in the freezing cold looking for a tree that looked like a V.”

The Freemans began geocaching in 2001.

“I’m a gadget freak,” Richard Freeman confessed.

Since then, the Freemans have geocached throughout the Midwest and West, including Arizona’s Painted Desert, Fossil Park in Sylvania, Ohio, and at Pele’s Chair in Oahu.

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Garmin has released a minor update for firmware for the 60C(S)/76C(S) units. Hopefully the track log issue that popped up a couple of firmware releases ago has been resolved. Preliminary reports indicate track log points are no longer being dropped.

What they list as what has changed from v3.80 to v3.90 is:

Added German tide support.
Added support for extended resolution maps like Minnesota LakeMaster maps.
Improved Data Review page to show depth or height of structures like bridges on BlueChart maps.
Corrected track log filtering.

by JOSH JOHNSON

Techno thrill seekers took to the desert of Churchill County in a search for treasure last weekend, but also for the benefit of Fallon leukemia cluster families.

About 100 people hit the back roads and byways of Churchill County for the 2nd annual Great Basin and Eastern Sierra Geocachers’ Navigation Rally May 20 and 21. Profits from the event will be given to Fallon Families First.

The rally began Friday night on the shores of Soda Lake, where participants fanned out across the desert in 4-wheel drives to find their treasure. Saturday’s events ran from the late morning until early evening.

In total, 51 new caches were created for the weekend rally. While some are in plastic containers or ammo cans, others are a bit more deceptive.

“There are caches out there that look like rocks,” Wolf said.

While planning the rally, the possibility of turning a profit came up, he said. Organizers wanted to give something back to the local community.

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BARRINGTON – It’s a sort of treasure hunt, or a really great excuse to go for a hike. Geocaching is a relatively new sport involving a handheld GPS (Global Positioning System) and coordinates to a previously hidden stash of tiny trinkets.

In Barrington, the Perry family is one of the many who have caught the geocaching bug in recent years. Geocaching is presently in 214 countries, and there are over 1.5 million active caches in the world today.

Access to a computer and a sense of adventure are the only other key ingredients. The Perry family, which includes dad Steve, and children Katherine, 10, and Thomas, 7, were familiar with the use of a GPS on their boat. But one day three years ago, they sailed to George’s Island in Boston harbor, where Ms. Perry spent time at her grandmother’s cottage when she was growing up.

Setting up a geocache is so simple even children can get involved. For Katherine Perry’s 10th birthday party this April, the nine girls at the party brought little trinkets they wanted to send off somewhere. The group stuffed the little presents and a logbook for anyone finding the cache to record their team name into an empty tennis ball sleeve. The group hid the finished product somewhere in the woods at Haines Park titled “Nine Kid Cache” by tomkat96. That’s part of the fun of geocaching, creating a team (or individual) geocache name.

“tomkat 96 is Tom and Katherine and their ages when we started to geocache,” Ms. Perry said.

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By Bill Toland, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Watching as her father crawled up a muddy stream bank in Schenley Park, young Caitlin O’Connell remarked that Dad has been known to not only climb these hillsides, but also fall from them.

Once, while searching for hidden treasure on his hands and knees in North Park, Dave O’Connell encountered an icy patch, slid from a walking path and tumbled several yards to a cold creek below.

But these are the injuries to person and pride that geocachers are willing to endure.

“It’s a healthy addiction,” Dave O’Connell said, as he and his 11-year-old danced over stones and ducked beneath fallen trees. “Once they figure out you’re not a troublemaker, it’s a pretty harmless activity.”

When he says “they,” O’Connell means state police troopers, park rangers, local bomb squads or anyone else who might wonder what a geocacher is doing along the side of a road, fiddling with a small box.

As the sport grows in popularity — partly by word-of-mouth, partly because the cost of GPS units keeps dropping — there have been more run-ins with state and local park officials who are initially uneasy about the idea of people hiding boxes, the sought-after “caches,” in America’s nature preserves.

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Saw this news article about an author who participates in geocaching and whose next novel will have geocaching as part of the story line.

Flanagan is ready to write anything that comes to her, with inspiration coming from all aspects of life. “Quirky stories you might see in the newspaper, someone might tell you something you think is hilarious…my father-in-law has also been a great inspiration.”

Her next novel will explore geocaching, an adventure game for Global Positioning Systems users -an idea that sparked her imagination three years ago when she became involved in the game herself.

However, Flanagan promised herself she wouldn’t begin writing the novel until her current work is complete.
“But I have sheets with plots and characters in my office.”

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Bart G. Farkas – Alberta, Canada

Knowing full well that my wife would think me insane if I used the concept of Geocaching as a justification to purchase a GPS, I went out and bought one anyway.

After explaining to her why the honing of man’s hunting instincts over millions of years of evolution have programmed me to need a GPS, she rolled her eyes when I told her I had purchased on.

Clearly the life-altering benefits of owning a GPS were not immediately clear to her, so I knew that the responsibility of proving the value of this technology fell squarely on my shoulders.

After learning about the nuances of Geocaching from the excellent (and free) website www.geocaching.com, I looked up several caches that reside right inside our newly adopted town of Cochrane.

After getting a babysitter for our youngest, my two sons (ages four and six) and my wife and I packed up for a little treasure hunting inside the town of Cochrane.

Our first search took place down by the river (just east of Riverview) and involved daddy getting his feet a little wet.
The search for this cache, the Cochrane Key Exchange, was bunches of fun, with the kids getting very excited at finding a hidden ‘treasure’.

After exchanging two key chains for the two key chains we had brought (one for each of our kids), we packed up the Geocache and carefully hid it back in its spot.

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Begins Monday, May 23, 2005

The 2005 Magellan BE THERE GPS Adventure will lead contestants on a journey to uncover and preserve notable treasures in beautiful historical locations in 30 cities across America. Yours could be one of them!

Fantastic prizes await, but only if you can BE THERE first!

To participate in this exciting 10-week event, go to www.magellangps.com to register beginning Monday, May 23, 2005. There you’ll find clues that divulge the top-secret cities, culminating in the unveiling of coordinates where caches are waiting to be retrieved.

There’s an interesting press release from Trimble announcing a new solution called Trimble Outdoors. It allows Nextel and Java enabled cell phones the ability to navigate and plan trips.

Here’s the snippet from the press release:
SUNNYVALE, Calif.,

You know about Global Positioning System (GPS) in vehicles. You have a cell phone. Now your cell phone can use GPS to guide you through the great outdoors.

It’s called Trimble(R) Outdoors, the first outdoor recreation solution that uses Nextel’s GPS- and Java-enabled cell phones for navigation and trip planning. Whether hiking, biking, boating, hunting, fishing or other off-road activity, your phone can guide the way. See http://www.TrimbleOutdoors.com or http://www.Nextel.com.

“Since many people already carry phones into the outdoors for safety, our solution eliminates the cost and inconvenience of buying a conventional handheld GPS,” said Rich Rudow, managing director of Trimble Outdoors. “With Trimble Outdoors, your Nextel phone can do the job for a fraction of the cost.”

Trimble Outdoors shows you where you’ve been and how to get back to where you started, as well as a compass direction and distance to where you are going, latitude, longitude, altitude, and speed. You can easily plan and
review trips online, move trip information wirelessly to your Nextel phone and use your phone as a navigation device complete with topographic, street, and aerial maps to guide your adventure.

Full press release…

By LESLIE BAILEY

East Texas is dotted with hidden treasure, but don’t look for an “X” to mark the spot – longitude and latitude coordinates are used instead.

Geocaching, the name of this high-tech treasure hunt, is five years old this month. Players use Global Positioning System units to find caches that others have hidden.

The “treasure” they seek usually isn’t valuable – sometimes a cache just contains a logbook – and if you take a trinket, you’re supposed to leave one of equal or greater value. But the fun is in the finding, players say.

“The whole idea behind the (sport) is to get people to go places they wouldn’t normally go and see sights they wouldn’t normally see,” said Tony Pate of Hallsville, a geocacher since November.

Pate says the attraction for him is the time he gets to spend with his 14-year-old daughter.

“I thought it was neat because it was a good, clean family oriented thing,” he said. “It doesn’t cost a lot of money; it just takes some time. Me and my daughter have gone out quite a bit and just spent some good, quality time together. I think parents need to do a lot more of that in some cases.”

Greg Barnett of Carthage has been geocaching for about three years. He and his son, Dallas, first played while on vacation in Hot Springs, Ark.

“We were hooked immediately,” Barnett said. “This is big fun.”

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