Don't Back Down

Recently, based on an article in the paper, our family decided to take another look at Geocaching. I had already decided that this would be one of those things that I pursued one day, but it was just "added to the list", and I figured that I would get to it when I could get to it. There was no date attached or anything. But with summer dragging on, and looking for something to fill the last couple weeks before school picks up, the article seemed to be almost an omen. So that meant that we needed the one essential ingredient for the task: A handheld GPS device.

In order to become a family who risks life and limb - or preferably, does not, we needed to be able to determine not only where we were, but where we wanted to go. Enter the GPS. Using coordinates that we could obtain at the Geocaching web site, we get a nice path to the destination. So it's fairly critical that we had one. You see, most caches aren't just laid out on the roadway for people to find - they are typically stored in tree stumps and under piles of rocks and things. So we started searching, so that we could go searching.

After a bit of cursory looking, I decided that we'd go with a Garmin unit. I can't tell you exactly why this is, only that it seemed like a good choice. The main point I was able to pick up is that the cheapest GPS units, such as TomTom, while serviceable, don't always have the best maps or routing engines. Not all the tracks we would take have roads, but still, it seemed like if we were going to spend some money, we might as well make a good choice.

This left Garmin and Magellan as the main choices, and the other point I was able to pick up was that the Garmin units are just easier to use. So then I had to narrow it down from what seemed like about a billion choices of Garmin units. It really isn't getting any easier.

Finally, I settled on the sleek handheld designs, because, quite simply, it seemed like keeping track of something small would be a good idea. The Garmin eTrex Vista CX Handheld GPS Navigator was actually the first one that came up on Amazon, and by this time I was getting a bit tired of looking, so I almost settled for it right there. But I did decide to read through the features first.

The unit is not only waterproof, but it comes with a full-color display (one of my "must have" features), decent batter life of 20 hours, a MicroSD memory card slot, for loading additional maps, and even has a barometric altimeter (to tell you how high you are) and an electronic compass. Compare this to the Garmin eTrex Legend CX Handheld GPS Navigator, which is $24 cheaper, but doesn't have the altimeter or compass. For $24, I'm thinking that the compass is a nice feature. The altimeter, less so - but that compass sure sounds like it would be nice, so we went with the Vista.

It turns out that it was a really, really good choice, because it seems that the coordinates of the caches will get you within about 30 feet or so, and then you have to go hiking into the bush. At that point, having a compass is a really helpful tool, and very worthwhile. Perhaps not so much in a car or something, but for Geocaching, it was very useful. I also liked the positioning of the memory card slot, which you could access without having to remove the battery. Many cell phones, for instance, make you remove the battery to get at the card. For a GPS especially, that's a pain, because it takes a while to reconnect to the satellites.

Do you have a GPS, handheld or otherwise? Any thoughts or opinions on it?