Plan of attack for a day of geocaching.

[+jackal228]

How do you get the most out of your time geocaching?

 

Now I just pick an area and search for "nearby" geocaches.

 

However, I was thinking about picking an area with a 5 mile radius and actually printing the map and draw out the shortest path from cache to cache.

 

Does anyone else do that?

[+kunarion]

I was thinking about picking an area with a 5 mile radius and actually printing the map and draw out the shortest path from cache to cache.

 

Does anyone else do that?

I've done that. But I've sometimes highlighted the "don't miss" caches in case things were taking longer than expected and I needed to skip over some.

[+Stoka]

Before going out i'll upload the caches i've chosen to my iPhone & GPS, then i'll pick one to start at and let the GPS tell me the next closest one to goto unless it's a puzzle that needs to be done in order of course.

[+ngrrfan]

I take the PQ and overlay that on a map and then figure out how I want to travel. Sometimes the "nearest" cache, as the crow files, isn't the one you need to do next as it may be several miles distant as the road goes.

[+sixsix210]

I very nearly always cache on foot. Before heading out, I'll use the "view larger map" link on something close to home, then open separate windows for caches that look interesting along whatever route I'm taking that day, I load them into my phone, and off I go. My app automatically lists them nearest to farthest, so I just go down the list as I go.

[+EdrickV]

I've got a ton of nearby caches and cache details already loaded onto my smartphone, so I can just look my GPS programs and decide which cache to do. (Getting all that info onto my phone would be a /lot/ easier, faster, and use up less space if I had a premium membership and could use PQs.) Since I don't usually know how much time I'll have for Geocaching, I usually do it one cache at a time. One of the programs I use will display caches on map tiles I've pre-loaded, but isn't a Geocaching specific program so doesn't show found/not found status. My other program is a Geocaching program but doesn't use a map. Between the two it works out. For driving directions I have a third program I can use. (Which is useless for any off-road navigation.)

 

Since I don't have a decent data plan, if I'm in an area I don't already have caches pre-loaded for, my main option would be to get cache info via the wap.geocaching.com site, and I don't really use that much. That does mean that in the past I have missed chances to find Geocaches because I didn't have the data for them loaded on my phone, since I didn't know I would be in that area. (Again, from what I understand, a few PQs could help out with that. Right now it can take hours to get all the cache locations + cache details onto my phone. And my method wastes quite a bit of space.)