14 state caching trip equipment

[+TeamMonroes]

We are planning on a trip from Ohio to Idaho spanning 14 different states and I'm trying to gather an equipment list. I thought I would post a message here to try to get some suggestions on what I should add to my list.

 

So far, I currently have:

 

iPhone with Groundspeak's geocaching application

Garmin Venture GPSr

Laptop (full size, but considering getting a smaller netbook)

GSAK license.

 

Anything else I should consider?

 

Ok, second question. After I've gathered my list of equipment, what process would you follow to update/search for caches as you progress along your route? Do you create numerous "Cache along a route" packages and load them as you go?

 

Thanks for your thoughts.

 

Dan

[+BlueDeuce]

I know many of the rest areas in Iowa have free wireless. I'll see if I can find a site that lists the same in other states.

 

http://www.roadtripamerica.com/dashboardin...The-Highway.htm

Edited March 25, 2010 by BlueDeuce

[+kayak-cowboy]

On the laptop I would put a routing program (streets and trips) or something similar. Connect the laptop to a rooftop satellite receiver.

Run some "caches along a route" PQs and load them into GSAK. Then load that info onto your routing program. With the satellite receiver hooked up to your laptop you can see where you are at and all the caches in the area.

I have done this on several long trips. Works well.

You can also run some localized PQs for areas of interest and where you are staying at night.

[+ras_oscar]

You might want to preview the caches along route and make several shorter"routes" that link together. I did caches along a route and got a glob at the begining, a glob at the end and not much in the middle. Unless there are NO caches in Richmond, VA, I suspect I was runing up against the 500 count queiry limit. Linked ttrips will end up getting you more potential victims.

[+TeamMonroes]

Post your route and let us give you suggestions on the best caches to hit along the way.

 

Thanks. I suppose I should also add to the list that the participants of this little journey will be my wife, kids 13 and 10, and myself.

 

The more cachers we meet along the way, the merrier!

 

Day 1:

Train from Cincinnati, Ohio to Chicago. We will have several hours to walk (no car) around and find a couple nearby caches.

 

Train from Chicago to La Crosse, Wi. Here is where we pick up our SUV rental.

 

Day 2:

La Crosse, Wi to Chamberlain, SD along I-90. With a drop into Iowa somewhere to grab at least one cache.

 

Day 3:

Chamberlain, SD to Rapid City, SD along I-90. Going through Badlands. Perhaps a quick (but currently not planned) trip to Nebraska for a cache.

 

Day 4:

Rapid City, SD to Hulett, WY (adjacent to Devil's Tower).

Mt Rushmore, Crazy Horse, Cave of the Winds(?), Deadwood.

 

Day 5:

Devil's Tower, then drive to Cody, WY via I-90, then SR 14.

 

Day 6:

Cody, WY to West Yellowstone, MN. Do north loop of Yellowstone.

 

Day 7:

Do South loop of Yellowstone to end up in Jackson, WY

 

Day 8/9

White water rafting - Snake River

 

Day 10ish

Gets a little fuzzy here... Drive to Slat lake City, UT via a corner of Idaho. Might sneak into Nevada a spell.

 

Days 10ish - 14

Fly from Salt Lake City to St Louis, MO. Eventually drive back to Columbus, OH via I-70.

 

Whew, I'm tired just thinking about all that.

[+jopasm]

That sounds like quite a trip! You might want to make several routes and generate pocket queries of all the caches within .5 miles of those routes - that will get all the quick and easy rest area/gas station/park caches along your route. Then do pocket queries for the areas where you're planning on overnighting or spending more time. GSAK can find caches along a route as well, so you might do a series of just-barely overlapping pocket queries along your route to load up on caches.

 

As far as equipment goes:

 

netbook - I love mine, I have a full size laptop as well but a netbook has much better battery life and is a lot lighter. The only caveat is that the resolution on a 10" netbook is going to be non-standard at 1024x600, some apps don't like that. The Asus netbooks lets you go to a "virtual" 1024x768 mode where you can scroll the screen. MS Streets and Trips seems to work OK in 1024x600 though.

 

external hard drive or flash drive - get a 2.5" external hard drive that runs off USB (doesn't require AC power) and backup all your photos and such on it. DO NOT keep it in your laptop bag, hide it your suitcase or somewhere else seperate from your laptop/netbook. That way if somebody grabs your laptop bag you won't lose those vacation pictures. A large-ish flash drive (8 gigs or larger) might work as well and would be easier to hide and a little more rugged. Flash drives are cheap enough that you could get 2 flash drives or a hard drive and a flash drive. Dropbox also offers a free 2gb online storage account.

 

inverter for your car - you can get a decent one that will power a laptop or netbook for $40 or so. Handy to have for charging the computer, camera, or GPS batteries while you're on the road for extended periods.

 

cables for *everything* and a spare USB cable for loading the GPS. Keep the spare USB cable in the glovebox or somewhere. If I'm going on an extended trip I'll even take a spare power supply for my laptop. I keep one at home and one in the laptop bag, so I just drop the home one into my overnight bag. That way if I forget the charger at the hotel, or it gets slammed in a door, or if it just stops working I'm covered.

 

I'm guessing you have the usual hiking/outdoor gear like water bottles, hiking sticks, snacks, rain gear, packs, etc covered. You might want a waterproof case/bag for your camera - either a heavy duty ziplock or one of the bags made for cameras "just in case" you're out hiking and it starts pouring down. Also hats and bandannas for everybody!

 

Check the bear warnings in Yellowstone National Park - some areas ask that you don't leave coolers visible I think.

 

That's the first few things that spring to mind. Sounds like you folk are going to have a great geo-car-trip!

 

Oh yeah, check out Cahokia in Illinois and Mastodon State Park in Missouri! There are several good caches and an earth cache at Cahokia, and an earthcache for Mastodon state park. You can easily spend a day at Cahokia, but you could do the caches near Monk's mound and visit the information center in a half day. Mastodon park takes an hour or two.

Edited March 25, 2010 by jopasm

[jholly]

I would not rely on the iPhone for your caching. Many times as I roll around the western states in pursuit of Delorme squares my cell phone indicates that I'm in no bars country. I suppose if you stay within a mile or two of an interstate you will be okay.

[+jopasm]

I re-read this thread (I'm going on a long-ish road trip soon as well) and thought I'd give a little more detail on the way I've been handling routes. I just took a medium length roadtrip and I'm planning a another couple as well as a long road trip. The equipment I use for the planning stage is my netbook with GSAK installed and a Garmin Dakota 20.

 

First I generate a route for my trip. For shorter trips (6 hours or so, basically day-long driving) I will generate one route and use pocket queries to find all the caches within a 0.5 mile radius of the route. That nets me rest area caches, park & grabs at stores, etc. Then I check the preview results page and see how many caches will be in the pocket query. If it's less than 500 I'll expand the radius of my pocket query by 0.5 until I hit 500 caches. Once I'm satisfied I'll set the pocket query to run and load the resulting file into GSAK. I'll also download a GPX copy of the route. Then I will generate pocket queries at my destination(s) and load those files into GSAK. Depending on the cache density I might have to do several caches. I personally prefer single-stage regular sized caches, virtuals, and earthcaches - if there are lots of micros in an area I might do a query on micros only, then another on my preferred types. I'll load these into GSAK.

 

THe second step is loading my GPS. Depending on how much time I have I will either drop the pocket query I generate of the route directly into my GPS or if I have more time to play with GSAK I will set up a filter along the route using the GPX file I downloaded of the route. It really depends on how much time I will have to hunt during the drive - if I don't have a lot of time I"ll only load caches near my route, if I have more time I'll load some that take me off the interstate/highway. Once I arrive at my destination I use GSAK to select the caches using a filter and a location and load those on my GPS. Before I leave I'll load the caches along the route back on the GPS. I tend to load lots of caches on my GPS to allow for spur of the moment caching wherever I am in the city/town/park I am visiting. I'll also browse through GSAK and find any interesting looking caches I definitely want to hit.

 

For a longer trip the procedure is the same except I will break the route up into 300-400 mile chunks and generate pocket queries for those. In particularly cache-rich areas I might create routes of 200 miles or so, it just depends. If my pocket query of all caches within 0.5 mile of the route returns 500 caches I will probably shorten the route just to make sure I'm not missing any. For each stop along the way (wherever I am spending the night or a few days) I will generate pocket queries of a larger area so I can do some caching. I'll load everything in GSAK and use it to generate a list of caches for each days travel. It's easy to set up filters.

 

I will also make note of what places are likely to have free wi-fi. I know that McAlister's Deli, Panera Bread, Barnes & Noble, and most coffee shops (but not starbucks) have free wi-fi. I'll also see if the rest areas in the states I'm travelling through offer wifi. That way if I need to get online to find more caches or whatever I have an idea of what to look for.

 

This is all pretty basic stuff, but the combination of pocket queries and GSAK makes for a very flexible platform for planning your trip. You can keep a large database of caches with you at all times and use filters to pare the list down to a size that will fit in your GPS at any one time.

[+vds]

Ok, second question. After I've gathered my list of equipment, what process would you follow to update/search for caches as you progress along your route? Do you create numerous "Cache along a route" packages and load them as you go?

 

I'd suggest a 10" netbook optimized for battery life. My ASUS 1000HE really 'does' get the 9 hour life they claim. It is pretty slow running GSAK nowadays but it works fine.

 

Some kind of mapping program to output GSAK into in order to look at what's available graphically would be nice. Personally I think MapSource is garbage. My old Streets+Trips circa 2005 makes far nicer maps in GSAK exports.

 

Procedurally start making pocket queries and build your GSAK database(s). Having a large set of caches on the laptop would let you do research in the hotel/car/train in down time, assuming you have already decided sleep is not required (geez, what a trip plan - you'll need a vacation FROM the vacation when you get back).

 

Use the web site caches-along-a-route feature which helps nicely in planning your route. I found it very helpful in doing a trip from Valley Forge to Manhattan and back a couple weeks ago. For me, printing out the map with selected caches indicated helps lots. I also find a notebook with a list, in order, of the caches that I've decided to go to REALLY helps. Sometimes it's too much data to do on a screen.

 

You'll need usb cables and power cables for the nav gear, phone, and laptop. I was surprised how many cables I needed for my last trip and what that weighed. Don't forget spare batteries as well.

 

Lastly if you're in Chicago depending on how much time you have you could just walk to Grant Park and do some of the many caches there. It's a short walk from the subway and a very nice park. If you just want to score a quickie near the Amtrak station, there's a virtual at the Willis (formerly Sears) Tower although it costs money to go to the top and do your Ferris Bueller imitation. Definitely fun looking down from a glass floor at 1300+ feet up :-)

[+TeamMonroes]

Thanks for everyone's response. I am currently creating queries for caches along a route corresponding to the day we will be on the road. I could only get the query to go 10 miles on either side of the route, so I had to adjust the route to zig-zag on some back roads thereby expanding the 10 mile limit further.

 

I've also started to gather the hardware I need. I've got a netbook lined up but need to investigate air-cards so I can have service on the road. I've got spare cables for all my connections, and we already have an inverter to power various devices.

 

We've decided not to drive back from St Louis since airfare costs about the same as the fee car-rental would charge for dropping the car off in a different location (+gas/food). Plus, I'll be tired of driving by then.

 

We will have a little over an hour layover in the Denver airport. If only there were a virtual cache in the airport, I could add Colorado to the list of cached states. I wonder if I could persuade a local cacher in Denver to do that. LOL

 

Thanks again,

Dan