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How do I look up caches in another city?


lazeedaze

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I'm new to the geocache scene. I now have a whopping five geocaches logged. All my 'finds' have been in my own neighbourhood here in Vancouver BC. Next month I'll be spending four days in San Francisco and would like to try to hunt for a few caches there. How do I look up what is available close to where I'll be staying in SF? Can I add the possible sites into some sort of a separate folder on my Garmin Oregon 450 so that they don't get mixed up with my local caches?

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Hello fellow Vancouverite :D All hail the mighty raindrop!

 

If it were me, I'd use Google maps to figure out where I am staying and then match that map with the geocaching site map. You can zoom in and see what is in the area, take note of anything that sounds interesting and download those a few days before you are headed out.

 

I don't think you have to worry about those caches mixing with the locals because (if you sort by distance) they will be way at the bottom of the list, but someone who owns a Garmin would know better than I :D

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Well, if you have local caches in your unit and you are not gonna be local -- maybe you shouldn't have local caches in there.

 

While I do not know how many locals you have, or how long you have had them in there -- be advised that the data goes stale.

That is, if you are holding it (data) in-unit for more than two weeks, some of those caches may well be disabled or archived. Add to that, there may very well be new ones that you don't have because you are still holding old data.

 

Going away from home? Dump the local stuff, load the SF stuff. Return home, load (new) local data.

That way, there is no "mixing" up... and you always have new (viable) data.

 

Will you have computer access in SF? Loading local stuff there is pretty simple. Just pick a cache centered where you are located, on Google maps. Run a Pocket Query with that cache as center-point.

No computer access in SF? Do it immediately before going there. Just scroll the map to the location. Run PQ same as above.

 

EDIT: Forums say you are standard member, profile says Premium. I believe the profile.

 

 

Good luck, and have fun!

Edited by Gitchee-Gummee
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Why use google maps to match.

 

http://www.geocaching.com/seek/

 

Place town or address in address box. Heck - just for grins, I just went to that page and put Disney World Florida with a 2 mile radius. Check out the map it gave with just that text. I did a google search for "Stange Sounding City Names", and the first hit was Unusual City Names. I randomly dragged the scroll bar up and down quickly and where it stopped, I took the top name displaying: Mullet Lake, MI. I entered that into the address box. Guess what.

 

Point is that address bar is pretty darn forgiving about what you put in there. It's almost like a google search for any location.

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Thanks for your suggestions and thanks for the welcome, 6NoisyHikers. :)

 

Gitchee-Gummee, I just signed up for a Premium membership earlier today so maybe the software hasn't updated all the details yet. :o

 

Yes, indeed, it does look like Markwell's suggestion of using the geocache.com seek function is exactly what I need. Shesh, why didn't I see that first! D'oh! :P

 

Gitchee-Gummee, thanks for pointing out that data can get stale and that I may as well not have too many caches stored on my device at any one time. I wanted to have some handy so that if I found myself with extra time while in a certain part of town I could just grab the GPS and go for a quick cache hunt. I guess I could just refresh my data bank now and then, eh? Maybe that's where the Pocket Query will come in handy - is that part of its beauty, that it can refresh the info on a regular basis? :unsure:

I'll have to take a closer look at that now....

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If you live in a cache-rich area where new caches pop up regularly, you can create a PQ of your usual caching territory, and set it to run automatically every week, say every Monday for example. Then when it generates each week and you receive it by email, just dump the old caches from the Oregon and load the new ones. Just takes a couple of minutes and you'll always have the most up to date caches on the Oregon. As I said, this works great if you live in a city with a whole lot of caching activity and just like to have the freshest data loaded up for your day-to-day "targets of opportunity"

 

Now if you're like me and live in a fairly cache-poor area, the automatic weekly PQ probably won't help much, because there isn't much change from week to week. I use PQ's mainly when I'm planning a cache run outside my home territory, or when I'm going to be travelling and want to have my GPS loaded with the caches for that area (like you plan to do for your San Francisco trip)

 

The easiest way I've found to create PQ's is to just search from the map. Simply center your area of interest within the map frame and hit "Create Pocket Query".

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So one other newbie question, when I clear old the old cache info before adding the new pocket query info, do I have to delete the GPX's one at a time from the GPX folder or can I just select all and delete? I'm not sure if there's some files in that folder that need to stay? Thanks for holding my hand through this, guys! :rolleyes:

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