Adventure Lab Postcards

Did you see your postcards under the Adventure Labs app?  You can share completed adventure labs on social media! 

Go to Adventure Lab App > Profile to see your postcard collection! 

MSPCGT: Adding to the Adventure

Our trips so far are more memorable with a few additional tools and toys in our bag.

Cachetur.no

Great tool for planning routes and holding cache details in your hand. Sign up for a free account, import the caches, and arrange the order of your route. The image below includes the cache order with travel distances and times. Click in for more detail.

This was the route up US 23 and the Upper Peninsula. 

Map created on Cachetur.no 

Michigan State Park Stamp & Go Guide

How about a guide to the State Parks? It can be bought at several of the State Parks or on the Peninsulas website.  Driving park to park, we read aloud brief descriptions of the parks. And, at the ranger booths, have the rangers stamp your page!

Purchase at Peninsulas Shop
Actual guide is only about 5" tall

National & State Parks Visitor's Journal

Look what I found on Amazon? Also available in some park gift shops....

Available on Amazon

This journal holds 100 park entries, and a great way to remember our adventures. Each night after a series of finds, I logged my parks, printed keepsake pictures, and adhered my souvenir stickers inside the cover.

Sprocket/Postcards

Speaking of printing pictures... My family likes postcards, but, after awhile, I ran out of things to say! But look at this cool idea! TaGeez and I took a selfie and added it to the back of the postcard to my sister. Now she knows exactly how much we enjoyed the Falls! The photo paper for the HP Sprocket has an adhesive back. 

Let me know if you use any of these ideas!

Tool Tip: Adding Calendar Events from Cachly

As a technology trainer, I’m prone to be curious anytime a new app or feature rolls out. Admittedly, in the past, I wasn’t a super fan of Cachly, having been forced-migrated (kicking and screaming) from Geosphere. However, with some recent feature changes and my latest discovery (below), my hat is fully in the Cachly ring!

Southeastern Michigan is a caching community, and we have events weekly in the suburbs of Detroit. At the beginning of each month, I run a query of events and manually add them to my iPhone’s calendar. This month, however, I noticed something on my Cachly screen when I opened Frito’s New Year’s Eve event.

What's this?

Ok, I obviously missed something at some time. So, curious as a (scrap)cat, I clicked the button.

WOAH! Did that just happen?!? It created an event appointment! It has everything I normally manually type: event name, GC# and event URL! Plus, it even adds coordinates! The only thing it doesn’t update is the time – it defaults to “All Day”. That makes sense since date is a cache attribute when you create the page, but time is not – it’s added to the write-up.

WOW!

First, update the Start and End times. Optional: invite other attendees, set alarms, allow for drive time. And then click Add. Voila!

Update the times and click Add!

Accessing my calendar, I can now see my events.

And, clicking into it, there are my details plus a map!

Sometimes the little things are actually big things. 

Now to add the HNY19, Taco Tuesday, Livonia Traveling Group, Warren Chill Spot, Southeastern Oakland, and I-275 events to Outlook. Time saved leaving me more time to cache.

RIP Geocaching Classic

7,434 geocaches found in 6 years

5 years of cache-a-day streaking

26 states/provinces

5 Mega Events

1 JASMER

Rest in Peace, my Geocaching Buddy

{Heartbroken} RIP - Geocaching Class App

UGH! All that work to save a copy of the app for naught!

When we opened up the Geocaching.com "Classic App" this week, this new message shouted the death knell of the app. 

40 DAYS UNTIL IT'S DEMISE!

I'm heartbroken. I can't hold back... the new app is crap. And I've tried several of the other iPhone apps (Cachly, Looking4Cache) but none make me want to use them. They are serviceable. And since GeoSphere is no longer supported, this will affect my geocaching future.

Saving my Geocaching Classic App

I admit. I think the "new geocaching app" by Geocaching.com is crap. No sugar coating it. I won't go into this here - suffice to say, I find myself turning to 'Classic' and Geosphere time and again.

So imagine my concern when my iPhone started malfunctioning. It randomly shuts down and plays games with battery levels. The forums have given me multiple options to repair, but the last ditch effort is a factory restore.

No biggie, right? Except, before you do a restore, you need to backup your iPhone to iTunes or iCloud. But an iPhone backup only saves app data and not the apps. And the Geocaching.com "Classic" app is no longer available (or supported) in the App store.

With the risk of losing it (and GeoSphere - it's no longer supported either), I've held off the restore.  But I found this easy-to-follow blog post from LifeHacker on What do I do when one of my favorite apps gets pulled from the app store.  Follow the easy steps to copy either Android or iPhone apps to a safe location on your computer or to DropBox. That way, if you ever do a restore or buy a new phone (which is my next option if the restore doesn't work), you are guaranteed access to your favorite apps.

I tried it, and the files appear to be saved to my personal drive. Hope this helps!

Riding the WAZE!

Ooh, AstroEricJ showed us a neat new app – perfect for Geocaching roadtrips!

WAZE is a GPS, Maps & Social Traffic app available for iPhones and Androids.  During our Chicago trip, we drove into a major rainstorm – you could barely see the hood of the car. Eric pulled out the app and saw other drivers (called Wazers) had posted trouble spots such as cars parked along the highway due to weather and lanes undrivable due to flooding.  He could also see construction, accidents, slow downs, closed roads, and policemen (FTF, anyone?)

I think this app might replace several I already have on my phone.

Yellow Pages: You can enter your search criteria and it will direct you.  It also has a Gas Finder feature.

Glympse: You can send friends notification of your arrival and connect with friends via the app.

Google Maps: On my phone GM is unresponsive.  WAZE does an excellent job updating as you drive.  Nice maps, too.

On the downside, it doesn't navigate to coordinates like a geocaching app.  It will suggest nearby addresses for selection.  So, if you are on an FTF run, it will get you as close as possible (while avoiding construction, slow downs, and possibly policemen—not that we ever speed, right?).

Heartbroken in my GeoSphere World!

Any GeoSphere users here?

I'm a GeoSphere (iPhone geocaching app) fanatic. I really think this app is a major factor in my 3-year cache-a-day streak. Imagine my heartbreak when I tried to upload logs two nights ago and started getting intermittent "connection error" messages.

When I clicked on my Online Profile, my stats weren't updating. I unlinked from Groundspeak and re-authenticated. I uninstalled the app and re-installed. Now my profile information is completely blank! Anytime I try to update, more connection errors (left image)! No quick access to my Lists or Pocket Queries - ugh!

And if I try to use the Caches Online feature (right image), I get a new message! "A minimum of 1 and a maximum of 6 users are allowed for the NotFoundByUser filter". No caching on the fly!

Keep in mind I've tried this on my own wifi, work wifi and using cellular data.

I checked the GeoSphere forums. The developer isn't active and hasn't released an update in a year and a half. Apparently, this is a known issue since 2013! Most of the forum posts say they think it's an API connectivity issue with Groundspeak and nobody has a solution. Some have come back and said it's working now.

Not me.

My iPhone 5 running IOS 8.3 and GeoSphere 3.2 is broken. It's like a punch in my geocaching gut. 

UPDATE: Good news!  It's working again! After several days of repeated attempts, voila!  Went on the Forum and found I wasn't alone so we think it had to do with recent Groundspeak API changes.  Relief! In the meantime, I tested several other iPhone geocaching apps.... brrrrr!

Klikaklu - Another LBG

I was SO excited to head out to the Livonia event last night - we've been snowed in for so long, and I couldn't wait to hang out with my LTG geo-buddies.  This group meets at one of three Livonia-area restaurants (first Wednesday of each month).  We have dinner, enjoy a raffle and normally go out as a group for some caching.  As we are in the middle of Winter (and it's about 5 degrees F), we normally limit the caches to one, but, in warmer weather, we will cruise to 4-6 of them.  Older Cachers get to spend time with their best mates and newer Cachers will learn alot!

Mibbs, our hostess, is fabulous.  She normally makes cookies and is great about circulating around the attendees. Everyone feels welcome!  And she's also great about pulling out some type of game or exercise that really breaks the ice.

Last night's attendance was low due to weather, but, I must admit, it was probably one of my favorite meets!  After the group photo in the Laurel Park Mall's food court, Mibbs announced that the event cache was in the form of a scavenger hunt created by Commander Overloard!  What is it about scavenger hunts?  It evokes images of children laughing and sunny days and great explorations.  Everyone loves a good scavenger hunt.  And, although geocaching is a type of scavenger hunt, this was a nice change of pace.

So, all iPhone users were asked scan a QR code and download an app from the App Store called Klikaklu (pronounced "Click-a-Clue").  I'd never heard of it, but I soon realized upon opening it that it was a a modern-day scavenger hunt very similar to Sighter.

Using this app, you had to navigate to 10 stops.  At each stop, you had to locate an item, "capture" it using the camera on your phone, and, once verified, you were given the clue to the next site.

To capture it, you would click a button and your camera would open. You had to align the object's edges with white lines that appeared on your screen. Once you aligned it, you would get a MATCHED message.

We had a blast - as only some of us had iPhones, the others had to walk with us.  It was fun roaming the mall en masse.  We would look for items, capture the image, read the clue and take off to the next location.  A 10-stop scavenger hunt, mostly indoors, on such a brutally cold night!  Passerbys looked at us strangely and many approached to ask us what we were doing (I think our adventuresome spirit was contagious!)

As we navigated through the mall, I think each of us had a problem at one time or another.  My app crashed, but, when I re-opened the app, all my saved locations were intact.  Some people had a difficult time capturing one site - but the app allowed you to override and move onto the next stage.  It was really easy to navigate, and it seemed to have no problems tracking us inside the mall.

So, how did it end?  At the final stage, we received a message "now it's time to sign the log".  Too funny!  I think it took us so long to find the cache because there were so many of us looking for it we kept overlooking it!  And, not only was the scavenger hunt the "event cache", it was also a LAB cache!  Frito Bandito won the raffle and will be able to claim a find on this LAB cache.  Brilliant!

Just a few minutes ago, the event cache actually published.  It's called Can you follow my lead GC4XTAC.  You can use the Klikaklu app to locate the cache or, as it's a traditional, you can just go to the posted coordinates.  I know which method I'd choose again!

Favorite point for Commaner Overlord!