Heather and I made this past weekend into a long weekend, and headed west to McCook.
I don’t think we could have gotten luckier when it came to the weather… absolutely perfect the entire time we were there. We tried to get outside to take advantage of that, and my parents provided a number of great opportunities for us to do that.
The first was geocaching. I was familiar with the basic idea, but hadn’t really thought much about it before the weekend. So first off, what is geocaching? Somebody leaves a cache somewhere, and then posts the GPS location of the hidden container on a website. Then we go to the website, take the coordinates and go look for the cache. The trick is that GPS will only get you with 10-20 feet at best, and the containers can be tiny! They seem to often only have room for some paper so you can sign the log before moving on to the next find.
Better description here: Geocaching
I should mention, we were well equipped for this in part because I got a new phone! (More on that later, back to geocaching for a minute)
So we loaded some points into our phones, and headed out to do some geocaching, or “treasure hunting” as my brother calls it.
Our first find!
They are holding the cache container in that picture… and I am going to guess you didn’t notice it before I said anything. We ended up finding quite a few points/caches… I don’t know the proper terminology. Heather and I really had fun with it, and hope to try doing more of it around Des Moines as the weather continues to improve.
Oddly related to geocaching and to my new phone… if you were to download the larger version of that picture I posted, and then use any sort of tool that will report to you the detailed information about the image you would find a few things:
- The brand, model, and operating system version on my phone
- A ton of information regarding the camera’s abilities and settings at the time the picture was taken
- and…
- The exact GPS coordinates of the phone when it was taking the picture.
Mind you, I didn’t add any of that… my phone just decided it would be fun to tack that all on. I didn’t realize the GPS coords were being added until I loaded the picture up in Picasa, and it offered to show me on the map where the picture was taken…. Lets just say you could find our first geocache using that picture if you were sufficiently determined.
I don’t want to sound too outraged, I don’t really think this is a terrible thing… I was just a little shocked.
Going back to the phone, I will talk about in more in a few weeks… maybe a miro-review or something, but I am still figuring it out!
-Jordan
Nelsons 