FRIMAN.org

Last saturday I decided to go find my very first cache. First I thought about getting the Marinstugan cache but when I got there the place was crowded with mugglers. So I got back on the bike and started pedaling towards the Piren cache instead. The climb out on the pier can be quite dangerous if the weather is rough but this was a calm and sunny afternoon. Less than 10 minutes of walking on the rocks took me out on the tip of the pier and after about 3 minutes of searching I spotted the cache! Eureka! I’m hooked! If you are a Geocaching.com member you can track my progress at my profile page.

I got a really good deal on a Garmin GPSMAP 60CSx GPS receiver and I just couldn’t resist it. I was actually shopping for a Sony GPS-CS1 to help geotag the photos I upload to Flickr but the more I read up on the subject, the more I realized it would be stupid not to buy a full featured GPSr for just little over twice the price of the Sony unit. After a couple of hours more reading and searching, I stumbled across this thing called geocaching which seems to be a really fun and geeky hobby. There are so many uses of the GPSr I don’t know how I could live without one before - geotagging photos, geocaching, helping me find my way on the road and in the “bush”, logging roadtrips and hikes and display them graphically using Google Earth, etc. Two big annoyances though; the maps are horribly expensive, and, Garmin has not finished their MapSource software for Mac OS X yet so I have to fire up my Windows-box for certain tasks.