Talk:2010-04-21 45 -122

Expeditions

Think there will be a fence between road and quarry? Oh well, never know unless you go look. I think I'll try for it after work, since I'm starting from south of portland anyway -- Rhonda

• Rhonda, if you want to give this one a shot approach from the gravel road instead of the highway. The quarry is open to the road and appears long-abandoned. Michael5000 22:08, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

It's 5:30, I'm tired, and this would be at least 2 hours of driving round trip. Hm. Honestly, given that I dozed off at work today (ssh, don't tell my boss) and am still feeling sleepy, I may have to skip this one in favour of catching up on sleep, which I am way behind on. Dammit. -- Rhonda

Sorry to hear about your co-ordinate confusion. Actually, for Geocaching, they seem to prefer DDD MM.ddddd'. I found that there was a button on one site that would convert it, but it did it in a less than helpful manner, so I just switched my GPS over to that format, since peeron offers the hashpoints in that format. APR will be happy to complain about his GPS's input method since he just learned after a year how to enter coordinates instead of having to point on the map! Jiml 02:58, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

• Eh, what the heck, it's all part of the fun. Michael5000 04:35, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

• Yeah, that's what I said until I scrolled literally across the whole continent to get to coordinates because I didn't know how to input them manually.... --aperfectring 04:43, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

• No doubt! But specifically, Mrs.5000 has pointed out that I almost certainly would have had a successful expedition if I had used my conventional oldish-school aerial image/ground-truthing method instead of having the new tool of the GPS unit to "help." She's right, but I don't feel any particular regret -- the trip was technically thwarted, but it was still fun and the technical issues were really more interesting than they were irritating. One thing I like about geohashing is that, although every expedition is insanely goal-focused, whether or not you actually reach the goal is not necessarily going to be the thing that determines whether or not you feel good about having risen from the couch.

As you have no doubt surmised, the best way to plan a route to the geohash is to combine the information provided by the GPS unit with information from other sources. I'm glad you didn't collide with anything or walk off a cliff. -Robyn 01:55, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

• Truth is, I can field-truth pretty much anything that isn't under a forest canopy and be comfortable that I'm within two or three meters. But we tend to have a lot of those, which is the ostensible reason for the GPS. The real reason, of course, is that it's a fun toy. Michael5000 05:36, 26 April 2010 (UTC)