Geosphere

On Saturday I was allowed to get out of the house for a bit and wander. I cache and munzee and take pictures when I am out and found that Geosphere (iOS) is going to be a great tool in the combining of the output from three sites and two hobbies. All three sites (GC.com OC.us and Munzee) allow a GPX to be downloaded for use on your devices so with a little bit of a learning curve I was able to easily drop all three sites data into one group and export the data to another GPX to send out to my caching partner +Wally Turbeville.

I wanted to try this not just for ease of use but because of something +Dave DeBaeremaeker mentioned awhile back. When we are out in the field playing we don't want to have to switch back and forth between different apps and websites. Having all this data in the same place is much more satisfying as I only needed to run two apps, Munzee and Geosphere, the whole time I was out. It made it a much more enjoyable experience as I took Wally into the wonderful world of OCUS and took him to several of their caches in Charlotte. I am especially glad to see the virtuals with OCUS that I can find and have the chance to place. I was a late comer on virtuals for GC.com and while I have found several, sadly I will never be able to place one. I hated when virts were taken away from GC. I found them to be some of the most interesting caches. I do understand the reason for archiving the cache type though. People abused them and when a few bad apples abuse the right we all lose.

As far as I can tell, there is no icon for Munzees in Geosphere. Come to think about it, why would you need one? You can't scan Munzees from Geosphere or mark them as found. This was all done for planning and mapping purposes. As you can see each regular Munzee was marked as a MEGA because how often are you going to come across a Mega. Both OCUS and GC caches fell under the regular icons of what is available for their particular cache types. Mystery Munzees were marked automatically as CITO. We were glad to have a good map with a nice view of what was available to us in any given area. I opted to make regular Munzees a black pin and virtuals a white pin in the map view and was very pleased with the view I got from that. I was also impressed with the accuracy of the Munzee app in different conditions. It was a nice clear day but I usually have problems dialing in on locations with a GPS under power lines and such. Most of the coords were dead on with an iPhone 4s and the Munzee and Geosphere app. (Props to TermiteHunter for dead on coords at each of his OCUS hides we hit!)

All in all a great day. 30 Munzees, 5 OCUS caches, 4 GC caches. And we had fun! That's the whole point anyway. We found some interesting history due to all three of the different parts of a game we both love very much. Caching gives us more than just coords on a map. It gives us an education, skills we wouldn't otherwise have, friendship. I wouldn't have met Wally if it hadn't been for caching or most of the people reading this. If we haven't met, you never know, could be never, could be tomorrow.

S