Feature Suggestion: Nearest caches to route

[+mc_squared]

This would be an incredibly useful feature. Provide a search method where you can get driving directions from MapQuest and find the nearest caches to the entire route.

 

My wife and I are driving from northern NJ to Eastern CT and want to stop off along the way to do some caching, but it's tedious to try to find the nearest caches to many different points along the route instead of a single query. All I can do is setup a custom query for all caches of a certain type in NJ, NY & CT, but some of them are so far off our path that it's impractical.

[+arrowroot]

When travelling, I find my best bet is to start with the State pages, and look for cache points near my route. [Note: It would be nice to screen out the virtuals!]

 

You could do something similar with the routing software packages (Microsoft Streets, Garmin Mapsource, etc.): load up the waypoints, and visually see what's near your route.

 

I am Arrowroot, son of Arrowshirt. I have many names, you know

[+Markwell]

In fact, you can do more than visualize. There's a method detailed on my FAQ here.

 

Markwell

Chicago Geocaching

[+The Leprechauns]

Markwell... a nice up-to-date FAQ, as always!

 

Have you considered adding the "Watcher" method of searching along a route, which I've described in several posts to threads just like this one? I'd call it the automatic, inexpensive method. Just draw a series of rectangles along your route using Watcher's area filter, and you get a list of caches that meet your filter criteria. (Those filter criteria can ALSO include ignoring locationless caches, ignoring multicaches, ignoring caches with a terrain rating of 4 or higher, etc.)

 

For example, two weekends from now, a carload of Pittsburgh cachers are heading to an Event Cache campout near Scranton. We will use one pocket query for caches within 50 miles of the event location, plus a statewide query to cover Route 80, which we're taking to cross the state, so that we can find caches along the way. Since Route 80 is essentially a due East/West route, it is pretty easy to chop it up into long rectangular segments in Watcher, and show just the caches that are within 20 miles to the North or South of the highway. All of the segmented GPX files can then be merged into one big file for each geocacher to download to their GPSr.

 

[edited to add links, etc.]

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Some mornings, it just doesn't pay to chew through the leather straps. - Emo Phillips

 

[This message was edited by The Leprechauns on April 28, 2003 at 12:09 PM.]