This week of school holiday isn’t as calm on the geocaching front as I expected. I dropped the son at a playfellow yesterday. It was a bit strange though. Normally, he doesn’t enjoy shopping at all and disappears towards the comics corner and I have always to search for him when I’ve finished shopping. Yesterday, his friend asked him if he would join a ‘trip’ to a well know Swedish furniture store. My son seems to have enjoyed it as well.
Today was the big day. I wanted to achieve two things: getting my 100th find and breaking a day record. In order to achieve this, I mapped a route out of 20 caches in the French speaking (aka Walloon) part of Belgium. But things didn’t start as expected. Read more…
It’s official: a Palm Z22 sucks when it comes to complete paperless caching. It’s ok for what cachemate covers, but when it comes to paperless spoilers, it’s pretty useless. I was doing the “De andere Bron” GCK1HD multicache and everything went smoothly on this nice walk. That was until it was time to discover the stash itself. I had a bit of deviation in the wood and thus I needed to rely on the spoiler. As you can see below, there a lot of trees on the picture. Read more…
Today the Great TB Race kicked off. This Travel Bug race – organised by TripCyclone - started today and ends exactly one year later (January 8th, 2010).
I went yesterday to Antwerp in order to do some shopping for all my GPS gear. My car navigation unit had some troubles after an update to the Navteq Q4/2008 maps. The installation process told that it couldn’t on the standard 2 Gb SD card. A second try (without deleting anything) worked but the side effect was that the installation process wiped al my bookmarked addresses. Contacting Navigon didn’t reveal much, which seems to be common for this manufacturer. Read more…
Or better said, I’m as blind as a mole as we tend to say in Flanders. You will understand in the next paragraph what I’m talking about. Read more…
There are a certain type of cache where you know were you should be and don’t know how to get there. A perfect example is wie,hoe,wat…? GCVZ84 in the ancient gates of military ramparts. When you look at the log, you see that many people has found adventurous ways to find the access to the place. I’m not so adventurous and I wanted to take a alternative path I accidentally found. I happened to be rather slippery too and a small misstep would let me end in the water. Luckily it didn’t happen and I ended up at the large gate whereas others usually end up at the other side of the rampart. So far so good, but when I opened the gate, it was rather dark, a lot of waste (how does it come here) and even graffiti. Real spooky. So I took my wind up LED torch -I try to be as environmental friendly as possible – and started to search. This ended up in a disaster. This type of torches are completely useless in such an environment. Since I’m not a shining example (sorry for the pun) of bravery, I gave up rather quickly. Read more…
It’s official. I have my own travel bugs. I found them yesterday evening in my post box. I told you in an earlier blog that it stroke me that the price at EU resellers is way higher than the US prices and they ship on top via expensive courier services. Read more…
It seems that the geocaching initiation during the team event exceeded my expectations so much that I got the ‘stash virus’. I told my family about it and under the excuse that it would finally help the kids to like strolling, I bought a GPS unit although this wasn’t without a struggle.
First thing I always do is search on internet for experiences, although I always take these experiences with a (large) grain of salt. It’s not the first time that these customer testimonials are fake or are biased. I had already bad experiences with car GPS units. That’s way I’m not so found on Garmin. Sometimes they don’t seem to understand in which country Belgium is located and don’t understand that Belgian roads aren’t divided in blocks.
Anyway, after some reading I thought I had found my ideal GPS unit in the form of a Garmin eTrex Venture® HC, which occured not to be too expensive and suitable for a beginner like me. Just when I was at the point to purchase it, I read somewhere that the proclaimed high-sensitivity isn’t like it should be since it hasn’t a classic SiRFstar III chipset. On top, the internal memory isn’t extensible and thus not a lot of topopgraphical maps – not even Belgium as a whole – can be installed on this device. Back to square one. Luckily I could rely on Pieter from GPS center, who gives some good advise averse from any sales pitch and sales figures goals and prefers happy customers instead. On top he’s has even better prices than most of the chain/internet stores with a lifetime warranty on top. Even despite the fact that his shop isn’t nearby home, it is worth while to consider this shop.
Btw I bought the Garmin GPSMAP® 60Cx. It doesn’t come cheap but it seems to be somewhat the de facto standard for geocaching. I also considered the Garmin GPSMAP® 60CSx, but I found the extra money for a electronic compass a bit overkill.
