How Do You Plan A Geocaching Trip

[+AtoZ]

Up to now most of the Geocaching we have done is just kind of hap-hazard. My 16 yr old is leaing to drive so I look at the GPSr and find the closest non-found cache and say drive that a way. Well now we have done most the close caches and they are getting further afield. So the question is do you just go as the GPSr points or do you have a set agenda when you go caching? If you have a set agenda how do you usually plan a day, or few hours? Thanks

cheers

[+briansnat]

I rarely go out specifically to geocache. I usually fit it in with a hike, so if I know of a geocache that is a nice hike, I'll pick that one to go after, or if I choose a place to hike, I'll checke for geocaches in the area.

 

Also, if I'm visiting an area, for business, visiting friends, family, or whatever, I'll check my GPS to see if there are any caches nearby that I can do. I have the closest 500 caches on my GPS, so I can travel quite a distance and still have something to look for.

 

I know a lot of people however, who plot their day's geocaching on some mapping sorfware like National Geographic Topo!, DeLorme, one of Garmin's,or Magellans proprietary mapping sofware, Streets & Trips, sor some other one.

 

By doing this they can determine the best route to take.

Edited July 12, 2004 by briansnat

[+AuntieWeasel]

Now that I've more or less exhausted the ones closest to home, what I've been doing is picking an "anchor" cache a distance away in a less familiar area. I get good directions to that first cache, then download 25 waypoints around it. After I find that first one, I goto "nearest" until I've done as many as I feel like. I basically stumble around until I find them.

 

I was visiting family in a whole 'nother state this weekend, and I was dying to do some caching there. I downloaded a bunch of waypoints, and would occasionally remark plaintively, "there's one .78 of a mile in that direction" as we passed in the car. No takers.

 

My dad was fascinated, bless 'im, but he can barely hobble and we were in hiking territory.

[+JohnnyVegas]

Lots of my caching is done quite away from home these days. First I pick an area to cache in. Then I run a PQ for 30 or 40 caches in that area (Not that I am going to try for them all). Next I print a map out showing all the caches. this way I am not runing back and forth over the same ground and then I pick a cache to start at and move in a circle or in one general direction. For software I use Mapend Topo, Mapsend Direct ruoute National geographic, and Microsoft streets and trips for my PPC.

[+drat19]

I travel/cache on a regular basis, and I employ similar techniques to what has already been discussed. Believe it or not, I'm still a "paper cacher", so I gather my target caches for a given area and enter them into my Garmin MapSource software, from which I load my GPS, and also from which I plot my route. Remember, the "closest" cache as the crow flies is not necessarily the most efficient "next stop". I use the street maps to determine the most logical order to hit the caches once I get there, and it becomes a methodical exercise once I'm on site. Sometimes I alter the order once I'm in the area, but then it's just a matter of re-arranging my printouts from that point on, and I still have a logical order in place from wherever I happen to be.

 

-Dave R.

[+Robespierre]

The first day I ever went caching, FroggieT and Rawhide1 drove down from Akron, almost two hours, and we drove another 45 min. to my closest cache possible, then down the highway, picking up close caches. From there, caches have gotten farther and farther, so I can't just cache on the way somewhere.

We plan "family caching" where 4 - 10 of us meet in an area and hit the closest caches. We're doing Delaware, Oh. later this summer, and they have a 2-hour drive down, so we'll put the trailer at the State Park for the night. I have a good 20 caches mapped out.

Saturday, I decided to go alone, so I picked Ranger510's caches, about 1 & quarter hours north, and found 5 of 6 before dark. He has nice hides. The nice thing right now is that, If I have time to drive at least an hour, I have about 6 directions I can go.

But this is why I have 60 total in 11 months. I can't just run out and get a couple.

[+CompuCash]

#1 - go to GeoCaching dot com and check out the closest caches to my home, or some in the same general area

 

#2 - go to each - print the printer friendly version w/ last 5 logs - I try to get 4 or 5 in general close proximity

 

#3 - print out the map or maps and maybe Topo for each

 

#4 - staple them together in sets

 

#5 - Download the waypoint file (*.loc) into GSAK

 

#6 - Clean out the old waypoints from the GuPSter

 

#7 - Upload the new waypoints to the GuPSter

 

#8 - arrange printouts in the most logical driving order and number them because I know by the time they get to the car they will be out of order

 

this usually take an hour or so (while the other half of this team is getting up and fixing our breakfast etc.) This is a procedure that has deveolped after several sessions which made it obvious that I was not as prepared as I wanted to be.

 

#9 - get all my stuff together - make sure I have tradables - this is not hard as it should all be together in my belt pack and make sure I have the cache print outs - make sure I have water and some munchies for the trail -

 

#10 put on the hiking boots and a light long sleve shirt as sun and PO protection

 

and I'm off. usually about 4 hours - by then we are both pretty tired and ready to cash it in. Time for a rest and making a couple new caches

Edited July 12, 2004 by CompuCash

[+Renegade Knight]

1) Download all the waypoints for my 500 maximum pocket querty.

2) Look at all those waypoints on a map.

3) Pick a route that looks like fun.

4) Go.

 

The drawback is that the 500 point max is slowly shrinking my circle so that I can't get a good feel from one PQ what's out there within my normaly driving radius.

[dampeoples]

I try to do them in search pages from my house. I've almost completed pages 1 and 2, working on three

[+JohnnyVegas]

I forgot to mention that around 25% of my geocaching involves an over night stay in a hotel with internet access for my lap top, am finding more hotels with free internet conections in rooms, and free (Real) breakfast and even one with (free drinks from 5 to 7 for those who want them), these places end up being a better deal than motel 6.

[+ZackJones]

Depending on what we're doing we'll use one of two different methods.

 

If it's a day trip we typically drive to the furthest cache we want to find by the most direct route. From there we work our way back home hitting caches along the way. I keep several waypoints in my GPS and use my palm pilot for paperless caching so we can alter our route with ease.

 

If I'm traveling to a distant city I will find the cache nearest where I'm staying and then look for clusters of caches near by. I'll then try to hit those clusters because my time caching while traveling is usually limited.

 

Zack

[+The Jester]

(with apologies to Johnny Cach)

 

I do it one cache at a time,

so I don't waste my dime,

you'll know me when I cache thru your town.

[+Bear_Left]

One of the advantages of living in a relatively cache-poor part of the world is that I can fit all of the caches on the South Island of New Zealand in one PQ, so they're all on our Palms and our GPSrs, updated pretty regularly. (GSAK now has a command-line option, so it's become an automated process.)

 

We usually pick a direction and head off for a drive toward some 'special' cache, and pick up whatever's on the way.

 

Now that we've done most of the dense caches in and near our home city (Christchurch), cache-hunts become more of a day or weekend trip than an afternoon's activity.

 

We've also discovered exactly how many caches we like to do in a day: just one more!

[+KVOM]

I've done 3 out of town caching trips, and my technique has been as follows:

 

1) Create a PQ for the target city location centered around a given coord. Filter out caches with difficulties higher than possible on such a trip (usually terrain=5).

 

2) Load PQ into GSAK as separate database, then look for likely candidates.

 

3) Load Mapsource map(s) for area and wpts into my Garmin.

 

4) Print Mapsource maps and cache sheets for the ones I've chosen. I want maps with street detail as close as possible, so multiple maps are usually printed. I print 5 or so more than I expect to be able to get.

 

When I get home, I delete the PQ.

 

For local caching, I have permanent weekly PQs that I load into GSAK once a week and then reload all the wpts into the GPSr. For a day's trip I select a target cache as the primary goal, set it as the center point in GSAK, and then examine all the other caches that are fairly closeby. The I print maps and cache sheets as above.

 

I'm now looking at getting a PDA for the cache sheets and going relatively paperless.

[+david g]

I'm only 13 and so I can't just hop in my car and go. I useally plan a day before to bike to one or two. I just print out maps and we plan a rough route.

[+Shop99er]

We cache pretty much the way CompuCash does. Do a lot of pre-work so we can make an easy flow of the day. Put the time in on the front end and save time on the back end.

 

We always download and print out about double what we think we can do in a day. Then we have options when we start. Lots of times we'll opt to not do a cache because the hike is more than what we want to do or there are too many muggles about.

[+thekitedude]

Ok, here is the overkill method. We just finished a trip from San Diego to Oshkosh, WI and returned by a different route.

 

1)Found Zip Codes for every 100 miles or so along our planned route. Ran PQ for 500 caches in Zip Code. That is a lot of PQ's and took several days to get. Probably could have had a greater distance but wanted plenty of overlap. Loaded these into seperate databases in GSAK: on the way there, in and around our destination, on the way back.

 

2) Used Delorme Street Atlas to find the lat/lon of all the twists and turns of the roads along our route.

 

3) Used this info to make an arc filter in GSAK and filtered out all caches that werent within 2 miles of our route. Had this broken into the three parts again. For each part there were a couple thousand caches and filtering them down to our route got me down to about one thousand in each part.

 

4) Used GSAK to load waypoints back into Street Atlas for caches along our route.

 

5)Printed out our maps of our route on a color copier at work with the waypoints on it.

 

6)Used GSAK to load one part at a time into my PDA and GPSr. This gave me a manageable number to work with at one time.

 

7) Each night or in the morning I would look at the maps and research caches that seemed like they would be in places we would want to take breaks and select likely candidates. Or if we happened to stop I could do a nearest search on the GPSr or the PDA.

 

8) When it was time for the next leg of the trip then I would load that leg into the PDA and GPSr again from my laptop. Having the info on the laptop is nice but for work in the car the PDA is just much easier.

 

9) After all that work we only hit 2 or 3 caches per state. But they were easy to pick out and it was easy to find convenient ones. Plus several in and around Oshkosh and Rockford, Il where we spent a couple days each. In 2 weeks we hit about 30 caches.

 

10) If I had been by myself I would have done more caches but the wife and kids arent into this as much as me! And of course it wasnt a caching trip that was just a bonus.

 

11) It was a lot of work. When I started the project I had no idea how to get started and learned alot. That was fun in itself.

 

12) The only problem was Travel Bugs. We wanted to move some around. I had a new on for us, and picked up two more before leaving town. Unfortunately not all bugs you find have their mission in life with/on them so when you trade them you arent sure if you are helping them or not. And I really only had internet access a few times. Guess we are too cheap to stay at motels with access. Logging caches late isnt a problem but I worried about not logging bugs soon enough.

[+CompuCash]

We cache pretty much the way CompuCash does. Do a lot of pre-work so we can make an easy flow of the day. Put the time in on the front end and save time on the back end.

 

We always download and print out about double what we think we can do in a day. Then we have options when we start. Lots of times we'll opt to not do a cache because the hike is more than what we want to do or there are too many muggles about.

 

thanks - works for me. I developed it (as I said) after several trips out and not having the information or tools I needed or wanted.

 

Ever driven to the cache and realized you didn't download the waypoints to the GPS? Now what? Drive home? Not if you have the printed cache page with you.

 

[you PDA cachers don't apply to this one obviously ] Course that assumes that you uploaded to the PDA too, doesn't it

[Iplayoutside]

Depends on how much time I have, and what I want to accomplish. Lately all I've been doing is snagging one or two here or there just in passing.

 

Anytime I go, and the rare occacian I go on a binge I print out the printer freindly cache page. I also print out any helpful logs or maps that I think I might need, and staple everything together.

 

I find this very helpful for a few reasons. One is I always over look something on the cache page that helps in finding the cache should I have trouble. Two is I write notes on the back of the pages once I get back to the vehicle. That way my log is a little more colorful than. "Thanks for the cache TNLN" Not only that, but it helps when law enforcement asks what you are doing!!