Tag Archives: gps

New Toys and Geocaching

While the Jeep was getting fixed, someone went into it and forced open the center console where I had, among other assorted junk, my ancient GPS receiver. I bought it in the early days, when GPS technology was first available to civilians. I paid an enormous amount of money for it, and, by today’s standards, it hardly did anything at all. But it kept me sane for a couple years, giving me something to do in those endless days and hours.

This weekend, we went up to spend some time with Skippy, and while there, I found a refurbished TomTom One for about half of what they’re going for new, and we snapped it up. I’m completely blown away by what a low-end device like this can do. It’s got street-level maps of the entire USA. It does turn-by-turn routing, and reroutes if you choose to ignore its advice. It tells you where the nearest restaurants are. And all sorts of other useful things.

So, today, after more than 3 years of not Geocaching at all, we went out and found four caches, and did maintenance on one of mine that’s been disabled for a while. It looks like we might get back into geocaching again, which would be cool. I’ve enjoyed it for a long time, just my schedule the last few years has made it very difficult to make time for it.