Kinetix' Family Geocaching Weblog

As you may have noticed, it's been awhile since things have been updated around here. Aside from the dark, bleak, North Vancouver fall & winter bringing geocaching efforts to a royal halt, we also began to plan out moving from North Vancouver to Kamloops early in the year.

Once we had our rough plans in place early in the year, we put a lot of time & effort in to the sale of our apartment and then finding a place to live in Kamloops. Then there was the packing, and moving, and getting the least bit settled in... and then my sister's wedding, and softball twice a week, and then family from New Zealand, and all of a sudden July's pretty much passed us by.

It's been great, though... it's tough to imagine this year so far being any other way, as it's been such a hugely positive change for us.

Now that we're just a wee bit settled, we'll get back to posting some pictures of our caching efforts around here. We've been out a few times, most recently today for quite a good walk in Peterson Creek Park. We had to carry the little guy a fair way, but that's par for the course.

Update soon!

Last Sunday we had some great weather, which may be the last bit of good weather we get for some time, considering our lousy forecast and the storm that's rolling through tonight though to, oh, Wednesday.

When we're able to get out caching, we're usually able to catch a couple of them at a time currently. Yay for the urban parks & trails (I will probably never say this enough, but North Van has a plethora of 'em... maybe I should consider hiding a cache or two, eh?).

On this trail which covers some wooded area between a couple of neighbourhoods and a golf course, we found this fun little weather station which looks more like a scarecrow than anything useful, and we also had a happy camper a day before coming down with his first cold of this season.

Happy CamperGimme All Your Candy

Yesterday afternoon turned out to be great for caching, so, we got our stuff together and went out as a family.. but what did I forget? Oh yeah, the title of this post gives it away. So, I have no pics to post of it - you'd think that after not caching for a couple of weeks I'd have been itching to do it right.

Our first cache was a two-stage multicache up in the Lynn Valley area. As with many of the caches we've found here in North Vancouver, we drive up to a neighbourhood and there'll be a little park rammed in somewhere. There's tons of them all over the place in this city, it's great that way.

This little park was a long narrow-ish strip of greenspace with wooded areas on either side of it. The caches were both on one side, and, as in some of the wooded areas around, I keep getting a harsh reminder that I should be practising CITO - Cache In, Trash Out. The amount of crap in some areas is embarassing, and I really should have a garbage bag and a trash pick-up stick with me.

Self reminder... camera for the nice stuff, garbage bag & pick-up thingy for the bad stuff.

It was still great to discover a new area. After finding the two part'er, we were off to a trail close to home in Mosquito Creek. By the time we were at the trail, the sun was out full bore and it was, dare I jinx it, almost like we were experiencing an Indian summer - which was great, because we immediately disappeared under the canopy of the trail next to the creek.

When we got to the cache spot I had to do a little hiking around to find it - and again I was reminded I should have a garbage bag... A lovely condom lying on the ground within a couple of feet of the cache. How considerate of somone.

After the caching we took the wee one to a nearby playgound and let him puddle around until dinner time. Aside from the garbage messes it was one hell of an afternoon to be out enjoying the air. At least that's still fairly clean in North Van.

As mentioned at the top of the content on the home page, we run Linux on our computers. Some may think that it could be a hinderance to task a, b, or c, but it's almost never the case these days, as long as you're willing to read a little, and tell others when their software doesn't support you.

The first step in making your life easier as a linux-based geocacher is to get things setup so when you are looking at a cache on geocaching.com and you want to get the cache imported in to your GPS unit as a waypoint, you should be able to just click the "LOC Waypoint File" button and be done with it.

This takes a couple of steps to setup on your system... it basically boils down to 1) installing gpsbabel on your system, and then 2) getting your web browser to understand how to deal with those LOC waypoint files.

First things first, install GPSBabel. Whatever Linux distribution you're running, there should be an easy way to install it on to your system. Check your distributions software management system - it should be there.

Next, you need to install the mime type on to your system or your web browser so that your browser understands what to do with those LOC waypoint files. I happen to run KDE and use Konqueror as my primary web browser, so I'll give the example that I used myself - your results will vary, but there will be heaps of information elsewhere on how to install new mime types in to your browser, whether it be Firefox, Opera, or even Links, if you're so inclined.

So, in KDE's Konqueror web browser, open up "Configure Konqueror" under the Settings menu, and then click on the "File Associations" icon on the left side. The right side should now say "Configure file associations". Click "Add" at the bottom of that list and you should get a new dialog window popping up, "Create New File Type". Select the application group, and for the type name, enter "xml-loc" and hit OK.

Now you should be looking at the "Configure file associations" window again with your newly created entry highlighted. We need to now associate this mime type with filename patterns, and configure an application to run. On the right, underneath "Filename patterns", click Add, and enter "*.loc", then OK. Under "Application Preference Order" in the lower right, click Add, and in the list of applications that comes up, enter in a name such as "gpsbabel", as seen here on the right:

Now in the "Application Preference Order" box you'll see what you've entered. Click on it and then click Edit. In the new window that opens, click on the Application tab. You'll need to enter the command line for gpsbabel as I've done in this example window... please note that these settings work for my GPS, a Garmin GPSMap 60CSX, your command line may (and probably will) be different - please check the gpsbabel website and test from the command line yourself.
Down below in the "Supported file types:" section, click Add and then use your newly created Application -> xml-loc mime type. Click Add, and then back on the "Properties for gpsbabel.desktop" window, click OK, as you should now be done.

Click OK on the main "Configure - Konqueror", and all going well, you should be done.

Next time you click on the "LOC Waypoint File" button on a cache listing page, you should see a pop-up dialog similar to the following:

Enjoy!

This evening after dinner I prepared for a couple of caches and headed out. As is so often the case, I was heading some place that I hadn't been to before, which usually makes things a little more interesting. When I got to the area, I was figuring that I could have some problems with muggles, however, I think I got a little lucky in that some people had wound up parking between the cache area and the big get-together going on, giving me some shelter from the crowd.

I was successful with the first cache, but there was a second I started to look for, which took me on a short walk, but unfortunately the light was getting low and there was a couple hanging out very close to the cache area, and they weren't taking off any time soon.

It was great visiting another park I'd never been to before, and of course getting just that much more familiar with another area of "my back yard."

Howdy, and welcome!

Geocaching has become quite the pastime for our family since we got involved, and I thought it would be fun to share some of our experiences with the world, hence this blog.

To start, here's how things happened for us...

First, I received a sweet little Garmin eTrex Legend for Christmas this past year. While it indeed was on my christmas list, I was pleasantly surprised to actually receive it. At the time, I had no idea about geocaching, nor did I imagine how much fun we would get from it.

My uncle, who was there and had a similar GPS unit, loaned me a book on GPS navigation and told me about geocaching. Little did I imagine how much fun & time we'd soon spend (we being myself, wife and baby son) getting out and discovering our own back yard, let alone all the back yards we'd wind up spending any time in.

It didn't take very long before I'd ploughed through the GPS navigation book and read up on geocaching. It only took a few days before I was up to speed enough, had planned out our first hunt, and, oh yes, we had a decent enough day off to go try it. In that first hunt, we found a funny little park/greenspace that we never new existed, and I did manage to poke around enough to find the micro cache. I signed my name and that was it - our first go at it.

Now, at the time of this post, we've logged 56 finds, have a newer GPS model, and I'll be posting more about our finds along the way.