Epic Journal – 15th April 2014

15th April 2014

I’ve lost my glasses.  I had them when I went into the office at the end of last week but despite popping in today there’s no sign of them.  Gah!  I don’t want to take my spares.  It’s little things like this that at the last stages of planning really, really irritate me.

Caching plans are also looking like they could be disrupted.  There’s chances of thunderstorms in Oklahoma City at the weekend and seeing as a lot of the caches I want to do are on dirt roads and they are talking possible severe storms and 6” of rain I’m getting a little nervous.

There’s part of me that’s annoyed, as if I don’t get 2000 caches whilst away I’ll be annoyed.  Then I remember the reason I am going to Oklahoma is because I WANT bad weather.  However, I’ll admit just the idea that I could possibly be in a tornado warned area this weekend is starting to make me a little nervous.  People talk all big but I suspect when there in front of a tornado it’s really a telling time of who has balls of steel and who’s a mouse.

I suspect I might be a mouse.

Epic Journal – 13th April 2014

13th April 2014

Today I went Geocaching with Westie.  I needed around 110.  The idea is to make  my 13,000^th my first US cache.  Dad and Rob dropped out because they were worried about the miles but in the end we didn’t need to do the second circuit.

Because I had no time to do my usual level of planning (which can take a couple of days), I instead just picked a large series knowing I wouldn’t have to research whether there was access between caches, etc.  We went up to Corby which was a bit of a journey, but it’s on the edge of the Peterborough rings and so I knew there’d be a load of extra caches to pick up.

Weather was great, so great that I got sunburnt.  Also managed to do a bit of secret filming as well along the way.

I still have a handful to pick up but I can do those over the week.  So that’s one panic over, my 13,000^th cache will be my first US cache.  As to which one it will be, it dependes whether I get time to pick up a virtual inbetween my flights at Atlanta

Epic Journal – 8th April 2014

8th April 2014

More kit prep today.  On the geocaching front I played around with the OSM maps I’d sourced and downloaded.  Still not fully sure they’ve worked but I can see roads in Oklahoma .  I also seem to be able to load caches from the Mac to my Garmin, so that’s good as well.

I’d like my first US cache to be my 13000^th, which means doing 120 caches or so in the next week.  Totally possible but it needs planning and I feel like I have no time.

Managed to do a bit more filming of the announcement video.   It’s difficult with people around the house all the time.   Checked the stuff I did on Sunday and it’s come out really well.

I also need to source a case and start packing.  I’ve not even sorted my money yet.  Starting to feel a little stressed!

Epic Journal – 27th March 2014

27th March 2014

So today I started building my Geocaching PQs for the trip.  I’d rather have too many caches planned rather than too few, so I’ve planned two massive routes  that I doubt I’ll get to complete.

Oklahoma doesn’t have a huge amount of caches but it has a few power trail.  It’s those I’m targeting, with a view that they will be easy and I should be able to rack up some numbers whilst away.

The problem is that these power trails are narrow and long, so my usual method of finding a cache to centre my PQ on and doing every cache for X miles won’t work here.  So I had to teach myself how to create a kml file of the route and then use Geocaching.com’s caches along a route feature. Took me some time and I’m sure there are easier ways to create it but it worked so those hours spent doing it were worthwhile.   If nothing else it will make for a great future article for GPSTracklog.  And more importantly, I have PQs set up that I can run whilst in Oklahoma.

The second challenge was the fact that I’m only taking the Mac with me, which means I can’t run GSAK unless I start running Parallels or all that crap.  However, I’ve found a replacement and seeing as I only need it for my US caches,  it’s probably best not to sully my GSAK database with a load of US unfounds.

The software is called icaching and is a GSAK clone.  It doesn’t have all the features but it has all I’m going to need so I purchased that and set it up.  Putting my newly created PQs into it, I really felt that I was now ready to cache whereas I didn’t feel I’d got anything done before and was starting to panic.

I still have to do another power trail and add in, but I feel the hard work’s been done now and it’s just a case of spending a coupleof hours creating the route to create this additional PQ.

Still need to get back to Oklahoma cachers about my plans but I’ve now starting to form more of an idea of what I’m doing and when.  Big question is whether I want to move my hotel around seeing as I could be caching in different parts of the state.  Things to think about over the weekend.