musthavemuzk

this is really making me want to go places outside of Eastern IA now. thanx alot ppl! Monty

this is good info to have for my 62s. i get close to GZ and then have been looking for a new cache this time selecting go to offroad and not shortest route by distance using the OSM maps. that is a timesaver if i can just switch profiles. guess i need to do some reading. Monty

2.6 is out? heck i just got 2.5 last week will have to check it out Monty

i do like the idea. hope it is good and not bad for this to be happening though. Monty

i have done something similar with my first TB. i visited some local caches to get miles on it and will figure out later where i want to drop it. Monty

Are you kidding, there isn't a state in the union that I can't think of at least a months worth of things to do. A lot of states could take me a year each to do all the things I can find to do. Ok, maybe I could blow through everything in Rhode Island in a week or two or three but the rest... But then I have a rather wide view of what I find to be interesting things to do!! Maybe another tactic for you would be to tell us what you find to be interesting, then we can suggest where to find it in each state. i so agree with this post. i am pretty open minded and can find things to do wherever i am at. if you are into historical places, caves, diving, 4wheeling or whatever it is you like to do i am sure you can find someplace in everystate to enjoy. i have recently moved back to IA. spent 18yrs in NW MN. before that i was in SF bay area and before that i was in IA. always been able to find things to do. things around Boone, IA where i grew up at. trains are big there. Kate Shelley High Bridge, one of the highest dbl track bridges in the US, there is a museum in Moingona for Kate, there are caches near where the old bridge was at. She flagged a train down to stop if from going into the river where the swollen creek washed the bridge out. this was late 1890's. near this location is where the high bridge was constructed. later renamed Kate Shelley High Bridge. recently they built a new bridge as the old one was causing delays in trains due to slow speeds across it. in Boone there is the Boone and Scenic Valley Train. they use steam and diesel to take passengers along old rail. Ledges State Park just south of Boone. The Dragoon Trail runs through Boone County. when the land that is now IA was first obtained scouts were sent out to let ppl know this. they traveled along the Dragoon Trail. i believe this was 1835ish. Pufferbilly Days in sept in Boone to celebrate its train heritage. Boone Speedway home of the IMCA Nationals. there are many wineries across the state. there are many old rail beds that are now used for rec trails. some are hard surface(tar or crushed limestone) some are grass or similar. miles and miles of these trails and more in the works. on the west border is the Missouri River and on the east is the Mississippi River (land between two rivers) i havent been tow watch yet but you can watch the barges on the river. Grant Wood is a famous painter youlikely have seen one of is works. American Gothic (GCAA61) there is a virtual at the home where he did the painting. in Cedar Rapids area is the Grant Woods Nature Trail as well as several other things dedicated to or in his name. there is also another area nearby that was used in one of his paintings. and yes there is a cache there (GC1HVNJ). there are several earth caches nearby as well. nothing like the grand canyon, but still interesting and for us in the midwest they are still interesting and help explain things about history of the land. living in NW MN (Thief River Falls to be exact) i also saw alot of things up there. if you are into atv's or snowmobiles you can play alot up there on those. lots of trails. you can also tour Arctic Cat (TRF) or Polaris (Roseau) in NW MN. Marvin Windows is also up there (Warroad). wanna fish? plenty of that in Northern MN. Lake of the Woods (can go out and see nothing but water, ice thick enough in the winter to pull a trailer house out on and fish through the floor), Rainy River (known for its walleye run when the ice breaks), Winnibigosh and little Winny are known for some big fish with Muskies being one of the popular fish ppl come for, but they are elusive known as the fish of 10,000 casts. there are many many great state parks across the state as well as national parks as well. wanna take a drive then get on one of the many byways across the state. head toward Duluth and see the big ships on Lake Superior. while there might was well check out Glensheen Mansion in Duluth and go up the North Shore to Split Rock Lighthouse, Gooseberry falls, and many other areas along the north shore as well. Can stop in many places in Northern MN and see statues of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, with Bemidji proudly having one of the most often visited ones. you can also take in the twin cities and all it has to offer if you want city things. take in a twins game at the new Target stadium go to the mall of america go to six flags park. while in Bemidji you may as well make the drive to the Mississippi Headwaters (GC1D5M1) as for North Dakota.....yes there are things do to there and the state is not all flat. though i thought that til about 4yrs ago. we went to Devils Lake for Devil's Run car show. this is a lake that has been growing and growing and growing due to flooding for years now. walleye fishing is fantastic when the ice breaks in the spring. the car show i mentioned has 1100 plus cars in the middle of nowhere each june. with many sites around town to check out garage tours of ppls car things. nearby is Fort Totten and they have renovated it into a 4 star hotel. nice place to take in some history. Sully's Hill is a wild game preserve and that is what made us change our minds on ND being flat. what a hike to the top of the one hill and the view was WOW!. we got to see Bison and other wild game as well as prairie dogs all in their natural surroundings. the border of MN and ND is The Red River of the North. it flows North to the Canadian Province of Manitoba. it seems every year this river floods, you mayb have heard about it in the news now and again the earth cache located there (GC1RJ14) South Dakota has of course the badlands, Wall Drug and The Corn Palace in Mitchell, SD. i am sure there are many other things, but this all is off the top of my head so to speak. now depending on what you consider enjoyable is what ppl can point out to you that are locals to an area. Monty

vantage point is verry minimal on what it can provide. but yes it will load your GC up. sadly it is an all or nothing load with VP software to magellan. you can of course go in and uncheck caches in VP, but it is tedious to do. i also wasnt able to find a map to use with it. i could look at my caches on a map, but that is all. i didnt see any streets roads or anything like that. i was looking at a map with I-80, I-35 on it and that was all. as you said though it works to load magellan gps. there are a few options to provide more control over loading caches. GSAK being the most commonly recomended. you can also clear out VP and load a new PQ so only the current PQ is loaded. in conjunction with that you can tweak your PQ to get best choices for you. Monty

i am new to caching and are not quite ready to hide any yet, but from what i have read is you need to pay attention to what works in your area. and not the new ones, but the ones that have been around a few years. see if they are original or if they have been replaced. some areas have better luck with this type or that type of container. depending on your location you have rain, winds, heat, cold, or snow to deal with. in some areas you might have more then one of those to deal with. i have also read that some caches are not found often and some are found very often. this might play a part in the lifespan of a container. more opening and closing will affect the container. i would also imagine that the cachers themselves could play a part in the lifespan of a container. how careful are they with opening and closing? how careful are they in putting things back as they found it? are cachers trying to stuff things into the containers thus misshaping it to cause damage or aid in the leak or break department? then you have the muggles that might find a cache....after they clean it our or just find it are they going to put it back nicely? are they going to close it nicely? just my newbie thoughts. Monty

i would not bother with vantage point and with a mac you do not need anything special to put pq's on it. http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php...amp;hl=magellan some have had luck running GSAK or other windows programs on their dual boot macs. i use a pc so i am not up to speed with that. actually here is the thread in the above link http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=257518 Monty

there is a file on the unit that is used for field notes and the find dnf NM and so on logs. i think this is in the geocache folder. but idk if this is also used for the smiley's that appear on the unit Monty

definitely have to shop around for ammo cans. price locally was much dif then if i made the drive either north or south for them. 8 for a 30 cal can if i drive 12 for the same can if i buy in town 10 for 50 cal if i drive 15 for same can if i buy local. drive is about 17 miles either direction. i looked through what they had as the first one i picked up was damaged on the sealing edge and i didnt want that. tough to open or close was ok by me i just didnt want bent or dinged up sealing edges. we have decided for our first hides we want to do larger ones. as we sometimes have a tough time finding caches big enough for TB's Monty

the replies above this are ones i am sure magellan was hoping to hear. the price point, even at 200 (what i paid for our first one) is good. it is alot for the money. yes you are not gonna be air dropped in africa and be good to go with finding your way out, but some might try it. i think if it was more stable and less glitchy it would sell rather well even at 200. though the price drops make it more attractive. get one for 150-200 that can hold alot of things and easy to use. or spent 80-150 for a pretty basic unit. not perfect, but will work for alot of consumers that just want to cache. Monty

i do think the GC is a verry friendly caching unit. even with all the bad luck we have had there are some things about it i just canot help but like. alot of info on some of the screens which helps if you have filled it up and want to go through the closest ones fast by ruling out some types of caches or whatever. i like that alot. i also like you dont have to go to a cache to read about it. with my 62s i have to go to the cache then i can read about it. extra steps. i also dont get as much info about multiple caches on one screen. i get distance bearing and name. that is all. i think for cachers they have a good thing going (magellan does) now if they can just fix the issues and tweak it a bit. with them adding the cameras to the new ones i hope that isnt a bad thing where they focused on gadgets and were lacking on other parts of it good luck with your GC Monty

i have had that happen with my 62s as well. both before and after i updated the firmware. i have also had to plug it back in and redo the caches from GSAK as it didnt show the unit as having any. Monty

do you have any screens of the geocaching parts? my gf is on her 3rd GC and well i like parts of it, but parts i do not like at all. i ended up with a 62s for myself. i do like the info provided on the caching side. where you get the d/t, size, trackables, name, distance, bearing. is it similar? any and all screens are appreciated. does it have the smart arrow and does it hinder performance as it does on the GC. many users have turned it off saying it helps performance. some have also turned off auto zoom on the GC for the same reason. how about and sluggishness when moving around on map or zooming? Monty

please get back to us after some use and see if you are singing the same tune. i have good things to say about it but i also have many negative things to say about it. we are on GC #3 right now. in the middle of them i bought myself a 62s. definitely would be nice to cross good and bad things with them. look around here for other GC threads and i probably have commented on them. no doubt it has good points to it. no doubt it has alot of negative said about it. if it works for you that is great. Monty

multiple bad units on one product would sour anyone. idk what the product is. we went to lake red rock event near pella ia this past saturday and i saw 3 others with the GC. the one guy said he was on #2. his first got went and it was replaced. the other 2 ppl i didnt talk to. he seemed to like his GC. i like some things about it, but overall i dont like it. mayb the new explorists will have some of the same features and do well. i agree though with mayb some firmware work and mayb some other things this could be a great caching unit. i just dont see someone with a higher end unit being happy with it right now. or even someone that is coming from say the 60csx being happy with it. yes it is paperless, but it is not great is some aspects. hopefully they follow the forums and have real testers out with it to give them honest real world input so they can improve it. or at least improve future releases of it. i have seen a few UK ppl interested in it and i would like to help them, but with 2 frozen units i am not willing to do much playing with it right now. they have asked about maps on it for the UK. i would like to think it has a base map for the rest of the world, but idk how much detail it would have. or mayb they would end up releasing a european version? it is a gps so you should be able to take it anywhere and get a sat lock. now the question is how are the maps in other areas of the world? mayb i need to go back to target and see if the price is lower and what can be done about it if it is? Monty

i think the price reduction is over at target, but not sure. it makes it easier to spend less money for it, but still i am not impressed overall with the GC. recently we acquired our 3rd GC. first 2 froze and well we got the 3rd one from target on sept 17. waiting to send the 2nd one back to magellan, but gf wanted a gpsr for the weekends event at lake red rock. so we grabbed one. we paid 199.99 plus tax for it at target. tis why i say i am not sure the sale is still on at target. so we had 2 working units with us for saturdays rainy outing. good thing too as when they loaded the events 150 caches on my 62s it overwrote the 3500 i had in it. at least we still had her GC to allow us to cache on the trip home. so we have a fresh 1.4 firmware GC with the smart arrow turned off and auto zoom turned off. however it still autozoomed. but the arrow was the same all the time. she didnt have anything to say about its sluggishness this time. so it was an improvement. i noticed, compared to my 62s, that it moved around the map much faster. which i liked. i also liked that it showed the name, d/t, size, trackables icon, distance, bearing, and found or dnf all on the list of caches. then when you go into a specific one you get more info yet. with my 62s it is not that much info. as well as you have to go to a cache before you can get the same amount of info that the GC offers on one screen for many caches. best bet here to see this without one in front of you is to google magellan explorist GC and look at the image results. to see screen shots. so to me that is definitely a nice thing to have. lots of info right there for geocaching. minimal menu surfing to find relevant info for what you want. my gf used this info alot as she didnt want to find micro's on saturday. so she scrolled down to find those caches that were small or larger. we also like tb's and coins so we wanted to look for caches that showed they had tb's in them when i filled it with pq's on friday as well as caches that were big enough to hold them in case someone dropped one and had not logged it yet. i also liked that the street names are easier to obtain with the GC then my 62s with OSM maps on it. i have to move cursor around to street and rest on it to see the name at the top of screen. on the GC it shows the name right there next to the street 90% of the time. the US and State roads show up easily on my 62s, but the smaller streets dont have the names right there beside them as the GC does. which is convenient. another thing i like about the GC is that it shows colored areas for parks (green) and cemeteries (white) my gf said she saw red areas too. coming down from speeds to a slow or crawl it took the GC a 2-3 minutes to calm down. it would show you one distance and bearing from cache and then once it had time to settle it would change. depending on speed we had came down from would be how much things changed. sometimes it was .1 mile it would change. and the bearing could be 180 degrees out as well. but i think this is something that if you are aware of you might be able to deal with it. my 62s does the same, but it takes under a minute to settle down and get right with things. the GC doesnt have a magnetic compass either which might help the 62s. i think for what it is it is ok. i just knew it wasnt acceptable for myself. my gf does like it when it is not frozen though. and it definitely saved our caching day on saturday since my 62s was wiped out of caches except for what was new at the event. i still think it needs some work on polishing the unit, but as i said there are somethings i do like about it. for myself i like the speed at which my 62s works. i like the routable maps on mine. i like how easy it is to mark a waypoint and edit it. i likehow the buttons to navigate are easier then the joystick on the GC. the GC screeen is easier to read in bright like i think. i am still sticking with the fact that the GC is not for me. it is too sluggish my what i was expecting. i do like some other things about it as i said above. so i guess it depends on what you are going to do with the unit as to how good it is for your needs. i thought about recomended a different unit for my gf, but she liked this one so i got another one. i sooooo hope we dont have issues with this one. 2 bad units is enough. as for the above mentioned comment about making sure you have the right battery type selected we have used just lithium in the GC so no need to worry about that. though i am considering rechargeables. Monty

idk if pics are included in the individual ones or not. as was said no pics included in PQ. just the good info from the cache page. coordinates name d/t last 5 logs hint description kid waypoints such as those for parking or trailhead or similar other needed coordinates no pics though. Monty

how are you putting caches on your GC? i started using vantage point and well i didnt like it. so i now use GSAK. when i was using vantage point with the GC i would just cancel when it started getting photos. mainly cuz it would take so long and it would not always get all the pics. if you are a premium member you can run a pocket query and download that to your desktop. unzip it and copy the gpx files directly to the folder on te gps. i forget if it is called gpx or geocache (the folders name on the GC when it is connected to the PC. so you dont need a program to put caches on the GC. you can also do them one by one wit the send to gps option on the cache page. however this will take awhile to do if you want to put many on there. good luck Monty

recent comments about the GC have said to improve performance you need to turn off the smart arrow. i forget the other tips users have posted. look through the GC related threads and you will find them. that was also one things i liked about the GC when i read the description. you have so many on it you can be out and about and start it up and likely have one close. for myself i put traditional, multi, letterbox hybrid and earth caches on it and have the surrounding 85 miles in all directions covered. now with my 62s i have to think dif as it only holds 5000 and not 10000. oh well. least i dont have the lag or freeze issues. although the battery meter is no better. Monty

that is whati was after with my question on thoughts about the etrex. mayb my words were not the best chosen for that. Monty

i am not sure if it works that way or not. we got a GC and within 10 days we returned it to best by as it froze on us. had only a few finds and being new we were not thinking or caring much about things like that. the replacement lasted a month and then it too froze. the first one after doing the 1.4 firmware. the second one after uploading about 8,000 caches with GSAK. this was 10 days ago for the second freeze. currently it is sitting on my desk waiting for me to go through the process to return it to magellan and see what they will do with it. good thing i had bought myself a 62s when the gf went on a trip with the GC or we would not be caching still. for myself using gsak and not doing epic cache runs like i see some ppl do i am ok with keeping whatever on the gps that i choose to put on it. we may or may not keep the GC when we get it back from magellan. i know i will not be using it as i wasnt impressed with it. just have to see if the gf liked it enough to give it another try or if she wants something else. Monty

you shouldnt have to turn off features to get better performance from a unit. you should turn them off or on based on your needs. Monty

nice information here. simple and easy to grasp. i had debated between the 450 550 and the 62s. i ended up with the 62s. in the end i felt i would have a good unit either way. 399 at bass pro store for the 62s. i briefly considered the delorme pn-60 but the display model didnt work so i couldnt play with it at all. i felt good with the menu to menu in the above mentioned garmin's. granted it was in demo mode, but still felt good about it. after reading things on the above models i think i made a good choice. hopefully in time somethings will be improved with firmware on the 62s. Monty