Organizing Your Day Out

[+JMBIndy]

The alarm sounds, you turn it off, roll out of bed and turn on the TV. The weatherman announces it's going to be a beautiful day, bright, sunny, nice temperatures. He suggests calling in sick if you are scheduled to work.

 

You think for a moment and call the boss, hacking through the conversation. After you hang up, what do you do next?

 

How do you decide what type of caching you are going to do that day? Flip a coin? Or use your spinning coin? Is there a rhyme or reason to your planning or do you just wing it?

 

The neocachers of the world need to know!

 

[Kemo_Sabe]

well, since I'm sort of my own boss...ummm, I ride to work on my motorcycle, work half a day and then wish I could go caching, but my family needs me. haha otherwise, I would just wing it

[+Segerguy]

The alarm sounds, you turn it off, roll out of bed and turn on the TV. The weatherman announces it's going to be a beautiful day, bright, sunny, nice temperatures. He suggests calling in sick if you are scheduled to work.

 

You think for a moment and call the boss, hacking through the conversation. After you hang up, what do you do next?

 

How do you decide what type of caching you are going to do that day? Flip a coin? Or use your spinning coin? Is there a rhyme or reason to your planning or do you just wing it?

 

The neocachers of the world need to know!

 

I only cache on Saturday and Sunday. Each day I wake up at 3:30 AM, put on the coffee pot and boot up the computer.

I have my PQ run on Friday so I load the zip file into GSAK. Sort the caches by closest to home. Then I run the GSAK filter of "show me the caches that have the last 2 as DNF. I delete those. I quickly review the top ten or so closest to my house, tick them off and load them to my Garmin 60CSX. Update the PDA with cachemates. Have a coffee,,,,,,yawn, more coffee, yawn some more,,,,take a shower, more coffee (no more yawning by now) get the geocaching gear on my belt, grap the hat, walking stick, camera, pda, the Quest2 (gotta know how to drive to the cache!), the 60CSX, the trade bag and CYA!!! Out of the house by about 6:30 AM to beat the traffic and the heat! Usually home by 11:00 or 12:00 noon, tired and ready for a nap. I do it all over again the next day. What could be more fun!!!

[Kemo_Sabe]

interesting......do you have a family?? and the bigger question is what time do you go to bed on fri.?

[+Segerguy]

interesting......do you have a family?? and the bigger question is what time do you go to bed on fri.?

 

Yup I have a family, kids all all grown and out of the house. I'm usually ready for bed on Friday nite by 10:00 PM. I'm retired from the Military (Air Force) and will retire from my day job (Aerospace Enginner) in about 10 months. I've been getting up early all of my life. I couldn't sleep in if you paid me! (Well, we can talk about that!)

 

My British Sports cars are my other hobby. You just have to keep moving!!

 

I get to wake up in only 8 more hours and get ready for work!

Edited April 27, 2006 by Segerguy

[+Adrenalynn]

The secret is to double-book your clients. Then call the first, blame it on the second, call the second, blame it on the first. voila! Time to go caching.

 

I then use GPSVisualizer to import the PQ into Google Earth. Pick a likely location, then pull the log on each, write it really tiny on a piece of paper. Then download the whole PQ into the handheld - just in case. Download the waypoints to the GPS using GSAK, and I'm out the door. None of this coffee , TV, yawn stuff ...

[+briansnat]

I have several kinds of finds.

 

The first is that Skigirl and I decide to go hiking and we'll check our planned route and see if there are any caches along the way. The hike is our object and the caches are secondary. If there are caches along the way, then great. If we can tweak our route a bit to bag a cache along the way we will, but our primary reason is the hike.

 

The second is the "I happen to be in the area find". If I'm visiting an area for any reason (wedding, work, visiting family, meeting, etc...) I'll do a quick search and see if there are any caches nearby and if I have time I'll go for one or two.

 

Next is the group hunt when a few locals decide to go out for a single extraordinary cache or a really good cluster of caches. I'll join up if it fits my schedule.

 

The last (and smallest group) is that a cache pops up in my area and I have nothing better to do and head out to bag it.

 

Outside the group hikes, I've yet to wake up in the morning and say "we're going geocaching today" and plan a whole day of bagging caches. Its not that I will never do it. Heck I want to, but I usually have too many other things on the table and when I do have leisure time, I'd rather hike, fish, canoe, play softball or soccer or dig in the dirt.

 

I also have a lot of caches to maintain, so the remaining time that I could be out finding caches is devoted to

maintaining caches.

 

I guess that is why I've yet to break 500 finds after a few years in this sport

[+Team Cotati]

The Team always plans in advance. We don't wait until the day of the expedition though. Depending upon the weather forecast we will usually do our planning on Thursday evening. This way we are all nice and organized for the weekend. Then we have Friday evening open for dinning out or visting with friends. Sometimes we even stay home on Friday evenings and make popcorn and watch a DVD from netflix.

 

One time recently we went caching out of town and planned so well in advance that we had time to take in a movie between our morning and afternoon caching sessions. The Team is somewhat different than most cachers though. We enjoy the activity of geocaching so much because it has opened new horizions for us and has taken us to many new, interesting and exciting areas. We have even noticed that our overall fitness has improved greatly since taking up this activity.

 

And another thing that we have enjoyed is when we travel out of town with the daughter's soccer team we usually manage to fit in some caching time. This we have found really gives us a good overview of a new area and sure as heckfire beats staring at the tube in the hotel room.

 

Every once in a while The Team gets tricked by the weather man and the forecast weather that we use for planning on Thursday evening changes by the weekend. This does not make The Team happy though it does give us a good excuse to go bowling.

 

It's all in the planning we like to say.

Edited April 27, 2006 by Team Cotati

[+Renegade Knight]

It depends. Some days are pick up a couple of local caches days and some just feel like we should drive to another town and look there.

 

Chaos thoery in action.

[+RoyalRed]

Planning? I always keep the 20 closest caches that I find interesting on my GPS. When I decide to go out I just go after whatever one is closest and then the next closest, etc. Sometimes I can bag 10 or more caches but most days I get one or two. Usually I have weeded out all of the ones that do not fit my bill as "fun" and have a great time no matter how I find or do not find.

[+sbell111]

I used to be a planner. I'd carefully map out a days geocaching and race around to make the plan work.

 

Lately, however, I keep a fairly recent PQ in my GPSrs and PDA. If I feel like caching, anytime or anywhere, I just pull up the nearest one. If it looks interesting, I go for it.

[+emb021]

 

How do you decide what type of caching you are going to do that day? Flip a coin? Or use your spinning coin? Is there a rhyme or reason to your planning or do you just wing it?

 

 

Ok.

 

By and large I cache on Saturdays &/or Sundays.

 

Typically, I start my planning on Thursday or Friday before, if I know I'll have a free weekend. I usually try to decide 'what' I will be doing. That is, where I will be going from my home. North? South? urban/suburban caching, large park caching (by large park caching I mean a large city/county park that has several caches that I can spend a few hours finding as apposed to a small city/county park with only one that I would include with other 'suburban' caching). What will be the 'bounds' of my search. (ie large streets).

 

Once I've decided, I'll check gc.com for caches within that area. I'll download the coords, print off the info (or update old prints from previous DNFs) (including mapquest maps for the urban caches so I'll know how to get there).

 

Then when I'm home, I'll map out my attack. Usually by organize the caching along the route I think I'll be driving along.

 

that's it.

 

Now, I'll also add that I'll mark the printouts with different things. I'll mark the finds in order (F #, date), DNFs in order (DNF #, date). I'll note anything interesting as well.

 

When I get home, I'll update my notebook with my finds, then when I get on-line I'll enter my logs for finds and dnfs. Find printouts will be tossed, dnf kept for future attempts.

[+sbell111]

Ok.

 

By and large I cache on Saturdays &/or Sundays.

 

Typically, I start my planning ...

Before I became paperless, I did it exactly as you do.

 

I remember one trip I took through NY and PA. I had four different notebooks. Each notebook contained printouts for a section of the trip, all arranged in order. Each night, I would throw away any printouts for caches that were not attempted. Somehow, I 'lost' many of the pages for caches that I did attempt. I tried to log them by memory once I returned home, but I know that I missed several - both finds and DNFs.

 

Shortly after PQs came into existence, I gave up on printing out the cache pages. It wasn't until last year that I gave up on preplanning except for when I'm on a road trip. I still do 'cache-along-a-route' prep for those.