Customer service
It’s always nice to meet the owner of the cache on tries to discover. It happened today when I was tackling ‘Victo wie?’ GC14ATB
But my caching WE started with ‘Vissenaken – plateau II’ GC1TVGA which is, as you might have guessed, a sequel cache. I started this one with a heavy heart. ‘Plateau I’ was so cleverly disguised that I couldn’t find it on my own. After I dropped the son at a birthday party nearby, I arrived there with the daughter – whom I promised an ice-cream as a sort of bribery – and started to investigated. Call it sheer luck, but it was bingo: I found it.
As said in the intro, I started today ‘Victo wie?’ GC14ATB or better said continued it. I did a first attempt some weeks but stopped after a couple of hours. Not that the distance to cover is that huge, but there are a large amount of calculations involved. A nice example is N C°(2*A*F).((H/2)(H*2)(G-H+I)) E (A/2)° C.((H-I)(H/2)G). That’s one of the reasons that I didn’t tackled it earlier despite being so close to home.
Anyway, I continued my journey today with GeoScout at hand. It’s a relief when you have something like this as tool. At first, GeoScout couldn’t handle nested brackets nor the ability to prepare the WPs in advance and thus prevent doing stuff ad hoc. I contacted Stuart Eastland in order to see what could be done. Usually people fob me off with a fatuous reply, but not Stuart. He listened to me and had a look at my proof of concept as I see how things could be grappled with. Yesterday, he proposed me a solution which I could try out today. Now that’s what I call customers service. I must say, it works like a charm. If you have a Windows Mobile, you definitely need to have a look at it. Maybe he’ll port it to other OSes someday, but for now you can try my proof of concept (there’s also a low footprint version available) if you don’t have a WM machine. Of course, it only covers the waypoint puzzle solving and you’ll miss all the other features GeoScout has.
Geoscout doesn’t solve all your problems though. I had troubles with a couple waypoints. Despite my experience (280 caches), I sometimes don’t see things and I turn completely blind for the (obvious?) things. I was probably dazzled by the beautiful scenery. This type of caches let you surely discover treasures like this. And it’s all so close by. No need to drive hundreds of kilometres in order to walk the beaten paths.
But I could rely on my benefactor resource in order to open my eyes and when I was closely to the final waypoint, I hear: “Do you find it?”. It happed to be Pépécoke himself. Now that was a surprise. He explained stuff (also a nice example of customer service) and after logging this cache, Pépécoke, De Elfjes and I chewed the fat for another hour and talked about our geocaching experiences. Many thanks for the nice cache and the good company.
