Bikebox

When I bought my Honda Element I thought I'd get a personalized plate and since I mainly picked that car so I could throw my bikes in the back without worrying about messing up the place, I called it my BIKEBOX and got that plate. Seemed like a good enough user name at the time....

I have no problem adding photos to my own caches and travel bugs, but when I log a find or whatever, there appears to be no way to add a photo to items owned by others. When TBs other than your own request photos, etc., how are you supposed to do that? How are others supposed to add photos for the travel bugs you have out?

Thank you! The site is still down, so I can't send this private. How long is the site usually down for maintenance? I'm pretty new and this is a first for me! I don't have Twisted Access on my list. Do you by any chance have the coordinates? You can e-mail me at mybikebox@comcast.net

This is potentially off topic, but... I am leaving in a couple of hours for San Diego and geocaching.com is down for maintenance. I have two travel bugs that I want to drop in S.D. Actually, I'll be in Coronado. I should have a pocket query with cache listings, but can anyone recommend a likely drop for travel bugs on Coronado???

Other than a cell phone I usually have my Leatherman. This weekend was one of the few times I didn't have the Leatherman. I brought my dogs on what was a relatively short hike to place a new cache. It turned out to be way too hot for the dogs so we cut it short. We were on our way back to the car when one of my dogs managed to pick up a five inch piece of cholla cactus stuck to her lip. Like I said, I usually have the Leatherman. No pliers today. No tweezers today. So, of course, today is the day I need them. I ended up with the cholla stuck in my hand (but off my dog's mouth) and ended up removing it from me with two rocks. If nothing else, in the desert, always carry water and always bring something to remove cactus.

I have a Magellan eXplorist 400. They make a bike mount specifically for the eXplorist series and, while pricey in my opinion, I bought one for each bike (road and mountain). The first time out on my mountain bike I took some air and on impact my GPSr went bouncing along the ground. I retrieved it and it works fine, if a bit scratched up on the housing. A few days later I was riding alone on my road bike with GPSr attached when I remembered what had happened on the road bike. I foolishly started to mess with the unit while riding -- trying to put a rubber band around it for extra security -- and ended up knocking the unit into the roadway while peddaling along at 20+ mph. It bounced and skidded quite a ways but, fortunately, was not run over by any cars. Further scratching, but still working perfectly. On my way home I stopped at ACE hardware and bought a foot of industrial strength Velcro. I put the "soft" side on the back of the GPSr unit and the "rough" side on each of the bike mounts. Everything seems to be quite secure now. Still, if a company is going to market a bike mount and show it on a mountain bike you'd think it would be secure enough to hold on to the unit despite a bit of bumping....

Here's one I saw today: =============== I found it (sort of), but I need to explain. I went on an EARLY morning walk around SD before my business meeting. This was one of the caches on my list (went 4/4 this morning). I followed all the instructions and found only one to be confusing - the number of blue chalks on the third artwork (one could have been green or blue). But using common sense and figuring that I didn't have to walk a mile to the next mural, I figured it out. So, I finally arrive at the final spot and everything matches the hint. As I just begin to look, a City of SD Parks and Rec maintenance truck pulls up and the guy inside gruffly asks me what I'm doing. Figuring I'd better fess up to avoid police involvement, I explain I'm a geocacher. He smiles and tells me his name is Phil, he found the cache while working, openned it, and followed the instructions to hide it somewhere else. When I told him that most caches stay in the same place, he said he got on the internet and read about geocaching and followed the cache's instructions. He then told me he had moved the cache to a carwash on the Sunset Strip in LA. I resisted laughing as he described the pole he attached it to. He was looking forward to someone else finding it. So - to end this long story - the cache is gone courtsey of Phil and is awaiting someone to stumble across it at an unknown carwash on Sunset. I enjoyed the hunt, but this was truly the strangest endings I've ever had. But I want you to know that I very much enjoyed seeing Little Italy. For me, it was a new part of SD that I had never visited before. I hope to return to one of its many fine restaurants. Thanks for the hide. =============== (sort of)...NOT. The cache wasn't there. Someone said they had moved it. Did he/she go find it in its new location? Nope. Didn't find it here, either!!!

I'm new, only been at it since April, and I have not yet come across any coins or travel bugs (about to start one, though!). One thing is for sure, though -- when I do find my first geocoin I hope it's not a crappy copy. It seems to me that if you purchase a coin with the intent of activating it and letting it travel, then that's what you should do. Buy two to keep one or buy one and keep it for yourself, but don't pretend to release it by placing a fake. That's a crock of shtink.

I suspect another reason Terracaching might have a lower participation level is that whole "sponsorship" thing -- you can't really do anything there until you can find two people to "sponsor" you as a member. I'm not sure what that's all about seeing as you just put up a post on the forum looking for sponsors and eventually you get them. When I first stumbled across Terracaching I got to that point and said, "Screw it." I'm inherently lazy when it comes to that kind of thing. However, today -- after reading this thread -- I went over and posted my request, etc. We'll see if anyone decides to let me on board!

Don't be so sure! The Scout is $19 bucks, is ultra light, brighter than a lot of these posts give it credit for, uses standard watch batteries, has a few lighting options and is easily worn on its strap or clipped to the bill of a cap. I'd say yours wasn't much of a steal at all!!!

I don't have it on hand, yet, but I just bought a refurb M500 on eBay for $9.99. Ten bucks? What do I have to lose? I'm only buying it to try out these PDA caching tools I'm reading about here. We'll see how successful I am! Anyway, the seller I bought it from is apparently in this type of business because he has a lot of them and the starting bids are all $9.99. I think he's selling new ones for $50. By the way, the M500, as mentioned in an earlier post, takes an SD card so its memory is virtually limitless.

I have a Princeton Tec Scout that I use as a secondary light while cycling and have also used it for night hiking. It's a great little light and I think, for the money, it's a best buy. It's light, bright, etc. It does not have a red lamp, so if you want a red lamp for certain nighttime activities, you'll need to keep looking.

Yes, snakebite kits are worthless and, as stated, waste valuable time and simply open you up to infection, etc. I don't know how much good kicking a rock does, but when lifting rocks or other items, lift toward you so the "opening" is away from you. Anything underneath is more likely to then be moving away from you to escape rather than toward you! And reaching blindly into holes or brush or whatever is always a dicey operation!

New to caching, I'm mostly ticking off sites close to home (so far about half urban and half quasi-urban). I've gone to almost all by bicycle, either my Gary Fisher Hoo Koo E Koo for off-road travels or my LeMond Buenos Aires for road travel. I have driven my Honda Element to a couple of trailheads and hiked in for a few, but I could have just as easily biked to the trailheads. Human Powered Vehicles (HPV) are the way to go!!!

I was at ACE Hardware the other day and they had spray paint specifically for painting plastic. I don't remember the brand and I'm sure it's not exactly flat, but if it sticks? I've only placed two containers (today as a matter of fact!). One was an ammo canister that I painted desert tan. But it's metal. The other was a small plastic container that I painted with primer (inside and out) and then topped with the ultraflat tan paint. I'm sure it'll flake off, too--it's stuck out in the desert, afterall. But of the admittedly few caches I've found, the Tupperware containers among them weren't camoflouged at all. They were just plastic tubs, clear with opaque tops.

Thanks to all for the help, but I think I figured it out. From TOPO! I have to export the date in degrees, minutes.minutes format then bring it into Excel as standard comma delimited format, make sure the columns are named correctly (name, latitude, longitude, altitude, date, time), and save it as an Excel worksheet (.xls). After that it imports rather cleanly into Mapsend. No titles, no data, etc. One weird thing -- in order for Mapsend to accept all the waypoints each one has to have a different time. I'm not even sure why the time column is there, but it gets created in TOPO!, so.... Anyway, if the first 5 have one time, the next five one time, and so on, Mapsend only imports the first waypoint for each time! 30 waypoints becomes 4 -- the path gets a little less specific that way! Anyway, thanks for the helpful hints!

I have a Magellan eXplorist 400 (my first GPS unit and I've only had it a week or two). This unit works in conjunction with the MapSend Topo 3D USA software. However, I've had the National Geographic Topo! software for sometime and have lots of hiking trails in that format (they are readily available for download). My problem is trying to get them from TOPO! to the MapSend and thus to my eXplorist 400. I'm apparently a moron. I can't figure out how to do with GPSBabel and I have been unable to make it work via Excel. I can download the trails (originally in a TPO format of some sort) to a text file, but then the trouble begins. The info is there but I can't cleanly import it into Excel and after spending an inordinate amount of time manipulating the file in Excel Pima Canyon in Tucson, Arizona, turns into a straight tropical transatlantic journey to nowhere. Excel wants to reformat the 32:21:25, -110:56:25 to time or some other calculated sum. MapSend appears to want the data as a "number" but Excel doesn't like it. I've tried "cell format" a number of different ways with no success. Any help would be appreciated. I'd really like to be able to pull these routes into my GPS unit in a relatively quick and painless way, but so far no go.