Before investing in a Garmin Dakota 10 (Which we love) our first few hundred caches were found with just an iPhone 3GS running the Geocaching.com app. We started Geocaching as we wanted a new hobby. We always used to do a lot of walking (Which is why we’re big on trails) but going around the same old paths just became boring. So I downloaded the free ‘Geocaching Intro’ iPhone app and we hit our first ever GeoCache that was only about a mile down the road. It was probably the easiest cache hide ever. A regular container in the end of the framework for a bridge over the railway line. Despite the clue saying something like “In the bridge” I didn’t have a clue where this mystery item would be concealed. 5 minutes later we found it. WOW! We read the stash note, had a look through the swag, read the previous logs and signed the book. It was such a great feeling to find this secret little container hidden right under our noses. Everyone remembers their first cache, right? (Feel free to share your experiences!)
We decided to go after a second one. This was a couple of miles down the road, but we had an idea where it would be. It wasn’t long before we got to the spot, however the iPhone battery died just before we were close to GZ. I had however read the hint that said it was in a tree stump and as we were only newbies didn’t recognise the obvious stick-o-flage in an obvious trunk until 15minutes later. We got it though. And it was another well stocked stash that made us think “WOW! This is fun!”
Since then I had an on-going battle with my iPhone’s battery life. Someone did our trail recently and had a few problems navigating back to the car after their iPhone battery died and left them in the middle of the trail with no idea where to go. I felt really bad for them and sent them a few iPhone battery preserving tips, so I thought I’d expand on them and add them to a blog entry as well to help others…
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