Where Is There For New Caches??
We have some very active cachers in Columbia and some areas are saturated. GPS Visualizer for the win!
On September 21st, we held a Community Celebration in Columbia and part of that was placing any number of new caches. Experienced cacher Unitzoid took charge and used GPS Visualizer to show us where there was open spaces in certain areas of our target locations.
It looked sort of like this but without the words. And numbers. And his map was color coded so that if it was a traditional cache, it was green, and a mystery cache something else. I think. That was a month ago.
Last night, we had a little training session. And even with my notes, I can’t quite get it right - there should be no words about radius, for example. Nor the Lat/Lon bit. I will conquer this!
The best way to do this is by creating a CSV file of whatever it is that you want to process into a map. These circles show me where there may be open room to place a cache; they need to be 528 feet apart from center to center. The center of one cannot be within the circle of another, I think. And yes, the fail in the lower right corner was seen and discussed heavily last night. I think it was because of the age of the two caches and a grandfathering in.
I have other important things to do today, though. I’ll be geocaching most of tomorrow as I head to see my daughter and grandchildren on Saturday. There is a football game. Then we will see. The campground I’m staying in is both a wedding venue and a horse boarding/camping facility with cabins and camping as well.
So I’m plotting my trip - the Jasmer Challenge as well as Missouri counties challenge, a cemetery challenge… and more. Keeping track of challenges is another hurdle, btw, but will be another post someday. The Jasmer: “To complete the challenge, you must fill your Jasmer grid by finding caches placed in every month since geocaching began in May 2000.” That’s a lot. Fortunately there are some excellent tools out there to help me find what I need.
Oh, I need to add laundry to my task list…
Back to the GPS Visualizer; one of the things I need to do is solve many puzzle caches and actually do some of the multi-stage caches so I can correct the Lat/Lon in my file and thus correctly work out where I can put a cache. If I really want to be efficient about it, if I really don’t want to bother a volunteer reviewer to confirm if a location is available. And maybe doing some more organizing on my challenges would be a much better use of my time.
Sending this out to the world so I can start laundry, plan food for tomorrow and for tonight’s dinner. Read some more here on Substack. Push a needle through some fabric. Cheers!