LeoGeo

Duuuuude!!!! Yes, that works fine on the New Google Maps. Thank you.

Yes, as husby024 pointed out, this problem occurs only in the new sort-of-Beta-test-version of Google Maps, which some people got an invitation to try. (I probably got one because I've sent corrections to Google Maps in the past.)

Thanks, but that doesn't do what I want. That gives me coordinates when I don't know them. But I already know the coordinate numbers. I want to enter coordinates in the address box (like "32 52.000, -117 04.000") and get a map with an arrow pointing to that exact spot. Instead I get a map with a map pin pointing to a nearby business or residence or street, NOT to the exact point described by the coordinates. Old Google Maps did this, but not the New Google Maps that is just now being rolled out. Bing Maps will do this, so I am switching to Bing.

If I use latitude and longitude coordinates with New Google Maps, it no longer shows the arrow pointing to that precise point, but only a "map pin" pointing to the nearest street address or road or something. Does anyone know how to make it show an arrow pointing to the actual spot I specified with my lat/long coordinates? Or does this feature not make Google any money, so they took it away from us?

For some reason today I suddenly remembered my best Geocaching memory ever. In 2004, when the younger half of LeoGeo Team was about to turn 7, we went caching in Dallas. The cache (http://coord.info/GL6T4DA) was located on the other side of a little creek. I said, "Let's go upstream to that footbridge so we don't get all wet and muddy climbing up and down the banks." And he said, "But Da-da, getting wet and muddy is what Geocaching is all about!" Can't argue with that. So we did.

Did anybody else notice any weirdness with GPS signals this afternoon? Around 3 p.m. Wednesday I was out in the middle of Mira Mesa Park, open view of cloudless sky, and could hardly get any signal-strength bars, even from satellites that the GPSr said were immediately overhead. After a very long time it did get enough signals and data to give a claimed 20 ft. accuracy, but if I moved off the spot everything went haywire again. Couldn't be due to sunspots -- reports I've seen are that we're in an extremely low time for sunspot activity now. Is my (admittedly old) GPSr just getting hard of hearing? :-)

Methinks the orange/yellow icons indicate Premium Member hides. Oho! I think you're on to something! Thanks!

Oh, and a similar thing happens with puzzle caches. Some are a square with a blue question mark, others are round with a yellow questions mark.

Can anybody help solve a mystery I'm experiencing with the new beta map? If I look, for example, at the caches around Miramar Lake (by entering zip 92131 in the map's "search" bar), I see some traditional caches displayed as a square with a green box inside, but others are displayed as a circle with a yellow box inside. The former symbol appears on the map's legend, but the latter does not. It has nothing to do with whether I've found the cache or not; it happens even with "personalization" turned off. At first it seemed that maybe the round/yellow ones were micro and small while the square/green ones were regular-size and larger, but then I found a few that didn't match that pattern. It also seems to have nothing to do with difficulty/terrain levels, or with the age of the cache.

Thanks, Barry and Jim, for the repeater info. As it happened, I didn't even turn on my radio on the trip last weekend, but next time I go out there I will see which of those repeaters that you mentioned I can hit. But I guess I won't rely on them for foolproof emergency communications! (I'm unlikely to go anywhere remotely remote, anyway )

One addendum to my post about Peñasquitos Canyon. Check the website first to be sure the trails are open. If it's been raining a lot recently -- as often happens this time of year -- they're closed until they dry out.

If you want natural scenery without leaving the city, Peñasquitos Canyon Preserve is a wonderful 6-mile-long natural oasis surrounded by (but isolated from) residential and commercial neighborhoods, and is well-stocked with caches, including a few Earthcaches. You could easily spend a whole day taking in the beautiful scenery and finding caches. There are also a couple of historic adobe ranch houses, one of which played a small part in the US-Mexican War of the 1840s. You can enter the canyon at several places; to go in from the east, park at the stated coords of "Welcome to PQ, Puzzle Canyon North", and take the trail south and then west. Another entrance, more in the middle of the canyon, is at "Park Village Cache". The western entrance is accessible from the parking lot just to the southeast of "WalkNCache: 1998". There's a map at http://www.penasquitos.org/map.htm showing the preserve and the places where you can cross the stream that runs through it. The website also has info about which stream crossings are actually passable (sometimes they get washed out). If you do go to "PQ", be sure not to miss the cache "Maddi's Funhouse." It's inside a natural tree-and-boulders "fort" that is sure to be a hit with the kids (even if the "kids" are grownups). And very near it is "The Toybox," a very old cache -- serial number GC20B -- over ten years old now! If you need a guide for this area I think I could be persuaded :-) to leave my desk and take a hike!

I know there are some Ham Radio cachers around here -- could you please recommend 2m or 70cm repeaters that cover Anza-Borrego? I've found a few listed that seem as if they might cover that area -- Monument Peak 147.24; Borrego Springs 147.855; and Palomar 146.73; but do those actually work in Anza-Borrego, and are there other good ones? Thanks & 73! de N4JIU

Hi, Matteo01 -- are you out there? Today in Peñasquitos Canyon I met a family of brand-new cachers. We exchanged our caching names, but not in writing, and I thought I got theirs correctly as Matteo01, but I can't find a new local cacher with that name or a similar one. I promised to send them some info but now I can't find them. So... are you there? Or does anybody know them and can point me to the correct name? I know they found TTuT #2 and #3 but they don't seem to have logged those yet. It sounded as if they'd joined up with the huge mob of cachers that were in PQ canyon on Saturday. Did any of y'all meet them on the trails out there this weekend? Thanks!

I saw y'all's signatures in the log when I was there checking up on the cache today. It was one of my introductions to San Diego caching when I first moved here -- I did a lot of newbie-style bushwhacking. It helped this former math major learn a new geometry lesson: "the shortest distance between two points is a straight line EXCEPT IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA."

Wildflower beauty is on display on the way to one of San Diego's oldest caches, "Lake Loot" (GC578 -- yes, that's not a typo: 578). At least if you go in from above, at Lakeview Park. White, red, blue, yellow, orange, and purple little blooms all along the way. If you've been waiting to snag one of the area's oldest (yet easiest to get to) caches, this weekend is the time! Oh, wabbits and hummingbirds, too!

1000 caches in PQ?! Wow, at this rate I'll never make it into the Penasquitos Canyon Hall of Fame. That would be Pocket Queries for Garmin GPSrs. I just saw it on the Garmin update page. Not caches in PQ Canyon... PQGT Nah, just a joke. I know there are only 999 caches in Penasquitos Canyon.

1000 caches in PQ?! Wow, at this rate I'll never make it into the Penasquitos Canyon Hall of Fame.

Can this thread be used to discuss flora as well as fauna? As a relative newcomer I wondered about the name of the nasty grass-like weed that has long, beautiful, but evil seeds that stick into your clothes and stay there because they have a fishhook-like barb. Is that "fox grass" or something else? Thanks.

P.S., the stenciled lettering on the bike says: 97TH BOMB GROUP / FOGGIA / ITALY / STOLL'S GOPHER / 341ST BOMB SQUADRON MAINT". This is located in the place where people apparently go if the get the wrong solution to that puzzle cache in the middle of Miramar Lake. (Although you won't find any actual caches at that mistaken solution, I, as the son of a member of the WW2 United States Army Air Corps, do recommend March AFB Museum to all radically geeky aerospace fans and anyone else interested in 20th century history.)

Here's a cache in Riverside that probably hasn't been logged in the past 65 years or so.... Photo taken from 33 52.926, -117 15.964 It's a tad west of those coords, under that B-17 you can see clearly in Google's satellite photo.

GC1BE91, "International Space Station," supposedly posted by astronaut Richard Garriott. It was approved earlier today by "iryshe" (who is presumably one of the top executives of Groundspeak). Various people posted notes; a couple of people posted "finds." "Iryshe" then deleted some but not all of the notes and logs, and locked the page for any further logs. What confused me was why my note, which was substantive and in the nature of offering a correction to an error, got whacked along with the joke fake "finds," as if I'd posted a commercial ad or an obscene picture or something. One of the selling points of geocaching is that in addition to being fun, it's often educational. Coords for a Space Station cache that point to the Baikonur Cosmodrome on earth would obviously be educational, even if in a small way, because it shows where many of the astronauts/cosmonauts get launched to the ISS; lets American kids learn that Cape Canaveral is not the only spaceport in the world; might lead some folks (especially born-after-the-fall-of-USSR kids) to wonder and find out why Russian spacecraft are launched from another country, Kazakhstan; etc. A set of coords pointing to a random spot in Canadian waters, on the other hand, just looks goofy.

The page for the new International Space Station cache states that it's located in Kazakhstan, but the posted coords put it in the water off Nova Scotia. Pretty obviously this is a simple mistake: if you change the longitude from West to East, you're now looking at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, in Kazakhstan, which is where you can "catch the bus" to go to the Space Station, and a logical place to spot the coords for this moving cache. I posted a note to this effect on the cache's page, but TPTB summarily deleted it without explanation (and without fixing the coords).

Ditto. Some of the Ivy League schools have ludicriously snotty access policies (yeah, Princeton, I'm especially talkin' about YOU), but in all other college libraries I've never had a problem with just walking right in. Even the rare-medical-books room at the UNC med school, which is understandably locked, was opened for me when I explained what I wanted to look for (and I'm not even a doctor). And ditto: Librarians rock!

Very, very cool. Thanks for the photos!