ZedTBear

I'm glad I asked this question! You can always learn so much from those with experience as demonstrated by the answer posted here. I feel less apprehensive thanks to the advice and look forward to finding my next cache! One thing, I would be curious to hear more stories on how geocachers have handled encounters with the police. There have to be some real doozies to be told. Maybe we can start another topic one day just for that.

Thanks. That was like what I was looking for!

Thanks for the feedback guys especially from those who served as police officers. I guess the concept of a geocaching ID card is not practical. I never meant for it to take the place of a legal means of identification. But what is wrong with a membership card showing you belong to the club and on the back of the card a brief description of what geocaching is about. You would still use a legal ID such as driver’s license to identify yourself but as part of the explanation of what you were doing you can also volunteer the membership card. Since this was my first encounter, I really got flustered trying to get the officer to understand. Next time I will know better how to carry my demeanor. Practice makes perfect.

Thanks for the PDF link. I had that one with me, thinking that was how I would handle such a situation, and showed the officer but he started reading the part on how to create an account on geocaching.com and said it wasn't telling him nothing. I think we need something right to the point. The Wikipedia description I think is much better. That is the one I will now offer first if it happens again which I suspect is inevitable due to what geocaching is all about.

I certainly wasn’t doing anything illegal, just looking for a micro in an urban setting, not disturbing anything. I don’t expect to flash the card to the officer and have him immediately say “oh you’re a geocacher so no problem” but it would speed up the process of him figuring out what you are doing. He may have difficulty understanding what is going on but someone at the station, when he calls in, might know and quickly set him straight. I’m just trying to think of a way of making it easier to get the point across. We have a card for just about everything else in our wallets/purses, driver licenses, insurance cards, medical cards , etc. so why not one for geocaching? Each encounter is slightly different depending on the actual officer as per your case. No card would have helped at that instant. You’re right, after some explaining, which by the way didn’t seem to be what he wanted to hear - when I said cache he thought I meant cash, and him calling in my driver’s license he seemed satisfied but I still got the feeling he was suspicious so I didn’t stick around. He did wish me luck in finding the cache but I didn’t feel he was earnest.

I think we need to come up with some sort of standard identification and explanation that we can show to a police officer if we are stopped while hunting for a geocache. Maybe something like an official membership card with a succinct description of the hobby. This just happened to me for the first time, after over a hundred caches found, and it spooked me. The officer, who was just doing his job diligently, had never heard of geocaching. That is not something you can easily explain in a few words especially when being grilled. I felt an air of tenseness during the encounter. I had a geocaching brochure with me but that was to general for him to get an understanding of it quickly. It would be nice if there was something official that can be presented immediately to diffuse any misunderstanding of wrong doing, like a membership ID card that says at least: YOUR NAME. I’M A GEOCACHER. I’M USING MY GPS FOR A TREASURE HUNTING GAME. GEOCACHER RESPECT ALL LAWS AND POLICE AUTHORITY. I’M HARMLESS! AND HERE'S A BREIF DESCRIPTION OF WHAT I'M DOING ... I know Wikipedia has a good description of geocaching. Maybe we can get that summarized on the back of the ID card too. The card could be issued by geocaching.com, if necessary for a small fee, to make it really offical. Any thoughts on the idea?

I still don’t get the fascination with cemeteries. There are many fascinating places in this world full of wonderful sights and rich history. Why single out cemeteries as so great? Other than paying respect to those buried there, poking around a cemetery seems morbid and disrespectful. Also muggles would see this as highly suspicious and rightly so.

I like the idea of a cemetary icon! I always use Google Earth to check out the sites. That would save time. (Yes I'm afraid of the prospect of death, but what sane person isn't?)

I don’t like cemetery caches either! To me it seems disrespectful. The thought of wandering thru a cemetery for no good reason conjures up images in my mind of ghouls, zombies, grave robbers, necrophiliacs and people obsessed with death. It also strongly reminds me what our ultimate end will be. I don’t care for that at all. I’ve read many posts of how people just love cemetery caches. Very few people say otherwise. I just don’t get it. I think others that feel like I do should speak up too. To each his own but to me it doesn’t seem right and I avoid them.

I guess it's a question of compatibility, since the new problem affects the windows and macos version as well. It could also be a design choice on the side of Google : the "customized" icons are still displaying correctly but only when hovering them with the mouse... The yellow pins show up everytime I move the map but I can get the icons back by doing a right-click refresh of the "Geocaching Network KML" file. That is annoying.

When press the “Geocaches” button I get a screen with two options. 1) Find a Geocache 2) Show Found When I press “Find a Geocache” I get list of all stored geocaches. If I select one it shows me a map with the geocache name on top and a “Go” button. Selecting the name gives me a description of the geocache but there is NO option for showing hints. I see the full description and the finder logs but the hint doesn’t display. Maybe the Oregon doesn’t have that feature. I’m using Version 2.80 which was automatically downloaded when I registered the unit. (Gave me no choice!) go BACK to the main screen and select the geocache button again after selecting GO on a cache. You will have a menu option for the hint. StarBrand is correct, and as I said in my post - you need to press "Go" to start navigating to the cache, then you can view the hints. In your example, you would press "Find a Geocache" and then select the cache you are looking for when the list of caches comes up. The next screen shows the cache marked on a map. There is a big green box in the bottom right corner with "Go" in it. Press that. You will see a map. (Personally, I would like to have the cache description show up, but that's another subject.) Press the X to get out of there and back to the main menu. Push Geocache - and there you are. There are other ways to find the "Go" button. Good luck and feel free to send me an email if you need more help. Thanks! It was 12 degrees , a foot of snow on the ground and snowing today but I decided to go out and try the Geocaching feature. Once I hit "GO" and the Oregon started to navigate to a cache I found the hint button along with other cache related buttons. Had fun but couldn't find the cache. Maybe it was buried under the snow. Thanks all.

When press the “Geocaches” button I get a screen with two options. 1) Find a Geocache 2) Show Found When I press “Find a Geocache” I get list of all stored geocaches. If I select one it shows me a map with the geocache name on top and a “Go” button. Selecting the name gives me a description of the geocache but there is NO option for showing hints. I see the full description and the finder logs but the hint doesn’t display. Maybe the Oregon doesn’t have that feature. I’m using Version 2.80 which was automatically downloaded when I registered the unit. (Gave me no choice!)

I don't. I want to see the actual hint. It's decoded in the GPX file but doesn't show on the Oregon geocache description page. I could just copy and paste it but that defeats the ease of using the automatic download.

Is there a way to display the encoded/encrypted hints in a downloaded GPX file? They don’t display on my new Oregon 400t but if you open up the GPX file with a text editor they are there under the XML tag<Groundspeak:encoded_hints>. I suspect someone will say that would make it too easy.