My aunt and uncle are in town and yesterday, Phillip and I drove southeast down to Black Diamond. Naturally, we did some geocaching along the way, and completed six more pages in the King County Thomas Guide Challenge. I am happy that Phillip is as excited about this project as I am.
Although we have a geocache hidden in page 748, we had not Found any of the caches in Black Diamond – until yesterday.
I tried an experiment with our TomTom yesterday. (I am more likely to experiment with our toys than Phillip.) I set up an “itinerary” from our apartment to my family’s house in Black Diamond, with the geocaches as waypoints along the way. I was thinking it would be easier than routing from cache to cache to cache. Our mutual verdict that the itinerary is a nice feature, but not too good for our purpose. The problem was that the TomTom did not announce when we had reached a waypoint, and the person acting as navigator had to watch the screen for the flags on the map. In fact, we actually did miss a waypoint (geocache) once and, when we realized that we had gone past it, had to turn around.
Our TomTom did mislead us once yesterday. It lead us down an unpaved road that dead-ended .7 miles north of the geocache. (Apparently, the TomTom thought the road continued on.) We switched to using the Magellan GPSr autorouter, which got us even more lost. When it directed us to go up someone’s private driveway, we gave up and went to go find another geocache on that same page. That geocache was in a park that happened to be full of volunteers doing landscaping – making our search pretty much impossible. We were then south of that other geocache, and Phillip suggested we give the TomTom another try. That time it worked – the TomTom lead us to the wrong side of the wilderness area, but we were able to find the trailhead from there. (A similar thing happened the day we went geocaching with Mike – the day Phillip and I were convinced we needed a TomTom. Mike’s TomTom lead us to a street 1000 feet from the geocache – across a pasture – instead of the street where the geocache actually was.) These things will eventually happen, though, and not are a fault of the TomTom.
The other experiment we tried with our TomTom yesterday was that we chose the “shortest route” option for all our routing. We concluded that the experiment was neither a success nor a failure. At first, it seemed like it was giving us some odd routing choices. Eventually, though, we realized that it was giving us exactly what we’d asked for – the shortest route. At the point in Bellevue where eastbound I-90 begins to curve slightly north, our TomTom had us exit the freeway, and directed us along more east-running back streets. The whole trip was like that – turning off one road, only to re-enter the same road two blocks later. Actually this could be a nice option when we’re looking for a route we’re less familiar with.
After visiting with my family yesterday afternoon, Phillip and I invited my uncle to come with us as went to find one more geocache in neighboring page 747. He accepted. The cache description said that it was hidden along a trail 75 feet from the road. We found the trail easily, but after hiking almost 400 feet from the road, we ran out of trail, and saw no obvious way to go the next 100 feet to the cache. We walked back to the car, and tried to find another entrance to the trail. We couldn’t. Then Phillip suggested I double-check the coordinates, which I had entered manually. I had entered one number wrong – a 7 instead of a 6. We returned to the trailhead, and found the cache right away, 75 feet from the road. Afterwards, Phillip and I agreed that it was actually a good introduction to geocaching for my uncle. Without that .1 degree error, he would be under the impression that geocaching was simply driving to a spot, walking down a trail, and Finding a geocache.
Yesterday, we Found 8 geocaches, and posted a note for that one cache we couldn’t look for because of the work party. We had no DNFs. We cleared up one previous DNF. We dropped two Travel Bugs, and picked up three TBs and one geocoin.
There was one geocache we Found yesterday that we had been meaning to look for as long as we have been geocaching. It’s close to my family’s house in Black Diamond, but because of the way we come into Black Diamond, we have always bypassed it. It’s supposed to be a clever, difficult to spot, container. Yesterday, we finally looked for it, and Phillip spotted it immediately – even before we’d gotten a satellite lock. It was a container we had seen many times before. It was a letdown for us. We should have looked for it a couple of years ago, when it would have been a new and clever container to us.
