Fall Geocaching
I go through a whole series of emotions when Fall arrives. The first is usually a mild depression when the realization than that summer is over finally sinks in. That usually happens the first day I have to ditch shorts for long pants because it's just too damn cold outside. That's usually followed by some kind of acceptance which stems from the fact that at least it's not winter. Frankly, winter is more mild these days in central New Jersey. Certainly not the snowy, windy, cold season it was when I was a kid. At least that's how I remember it. Sometime there around that acceptance phase I get the itch to go Geocaching again. This is the second or third year in a row that this seasonal desire has hit me and yesterday at lunch I followed through with a quick cache find in Hoboken.
The interesting thing about this year's caching craze is going to be my iPhone 3G. This all-in-one device is almost the perfect geocaching tool. I downloaded Geopher Lite which is a bit clunky but it does the job. The 3G GPS in the location I was searching was dead accurate. Probably due to the fact that there was a very open sky over the cache site. There are a few things that might keep me from using the iPhone exclusively. The battery life is still not great and I'd be worried that there are some areas where there would be no 3G or Edge signal so any app that depended on the network just wouldn't work. I'm curious to see how the Geocaching.com site's own app works and if it has any "off-line" capability. So for now I'll probably take my Garmin and stash some printed cache pages in my pocket if I have the time to hunt in a particular area. I'll probably write up my gear sometime in the future but for now I'll see you out on the trail.
Labels: geocaching, iphone
