Track Back

Today, 3/4 of GAIN Academy and I met up with Trubador, the last finder of our "Foo Foo" geocache, GCY9ZQ. He showed me where it was (since I could not find it before my MN trip -- it was about 45 ft. from its original location) and I removed it for maintenance. While walking along, he mentioned that the main difference between his gps and our gps, in his understanding, was the amount of waypoints the unit would remember. (You know how it goes -- bigger, better, faster, more!) This is when I told him about the track function on Garmin units. We used it for our walk to and from the geocache.

Before school let out, I read about tracking (and "track back") in the book, _Fun With GPS_, by Don Cooke. I tested it in MN with my sister while driving to and from the nearest major town, and loved how easy and practical it was. It could be a pretty handy function.

It could be a fun function, too. The Cooke book suggests walking a path over a large field -- making a design or spelling something (your name, for example). You could also "track back" over your design with a lawn mower. Tracking can also be a useful function. After reviewing the July Geo-breakfast video, I thought it would be worthwhile to mention track and track back here for people who have a tendency to find geocaches, but get lost on the way back to the car. I'm not naming any names.

Here is an example sailplane track with GoogleEarth, found at the Fun With GPS website. Just look for the menu on the left hand side of the page and click on "GPS in Google Earth."

Hey-o to Mrs. Janes's classes!

I spent a couple hours this morning in school! Mrs. Janes, an enthusiastic sixth grade teacher, asked me to speak to her social studies classes about geocaching. She has her eye on placing a geocache in the school's outdoor classroom. Hopefully the board will approve such a placement, because I think geocaching and gps units make a great fit in a school's curriculum. I also think of it as a small part of education -- reading, playing volleyball, singing, using a gps unit, etc. are all lifelong leisure activities, and all are certainly appropriate to introduce at school. I am not saying that a school is obligated to teach geocaching or mapping, or that geocaching is equal to reading, but I will say that most everything in life is educational. And that makes everything a candidate for learning in (and out of) school. Mrs. Janes also had me talk about travel bugs with the idea of having class travel bugs. Here are some of the kids I talked to -- see the yellow Garmin in the front? Nice Statue of Liberty stance, by the way. Very good form for reception. Watch for a new cache, all you geocachers in the area!

I thought about what Mrs. Janes said in class -- relating my adult geocaching in terms of sixth grade life, making parallels between geocaching lingo and abbreviations and sixth grade text messaging lingo and abbreviations, and comparing the cost of an iPod to a gps unit. I forgot to mention PodCacher -- one of her classes was creating a podcast.

On a related note, I love that geocaching has opened me up to great new places. I ran a new trail twice this week, and got a kick out finding a humorous geocache along the way -- GC102A0, The Easiest Cache in the World. I would not have tried running in this area until I saw the traffic it got during our cliff swallow trip (see _Testing My Photo_ , a post from March 2007), which was also a geocaching trip. My new wish may be to get the family some off-road bikes. The hills there are fairly fun on foot, but with the speed of a bike, I think the fun meter would go up a couple notches.

I could take the gps-r along to record bike speed and relate speed to a map our bike travels, an idea I got from _Fun with GPS_, by Don Cooke. I found the book while walking out of the Clive Public Library earlier this week. I already like running with a gps unit. Now I am inspired to try a couple new things with it.

Lastly, I promoted a phenological survey (done online) a while back at the IGO Forums. Today, I finally got to take a couple waypoints for it (although no flowers yet). Peace to all!