Elizabeth bought a Garmin eTrix Legend GPS unit and we did our first GeoCache tonight.
GeoCaching is a fun adventure where people hide stuff and then post the GPS coordinates. When you find the cache, you put the date, time and any other note in the log book, look through the goodies and if you take a goodie, you leave a goodie. We didn’t have one to leave.
It took us several tries to get near the spot. With no maps yet, we used my Magellan 750 to get us in the neighborhood, parked and then went into the park. We rutted around in the wrong location, then zoomed in and with a 25 foot accuracy, stood still until we knew we were close. We found it!
Elizabeth found some free software for Windows, EasyGPS that lets you load a “.loc” file directly into the unit over serial. That made entering coordinates easier!
So this is a fun activity that is nearly free. Once she gets some maps on the thing we can be more reliant on the handheld. There are many thousands of caches, some almost in our backyard. Who knew!