So I bought the Geocaching Android App and tested it out to make sure it loaded the nearby caches and showed the waypoints for them on the map.

All Set, right?

Ummm…. yeah, not so much. Those who know me well will not be terribly surprised by anything that follows.

We chose a chache that was close by. It is located at the Bloomfield Cemetary in the old Civil War section. We started off real well and found the waypoint right off.

That’s when things started going south (cool pun, eh?) in a hurry.

We had to find the grave markers of three Civil War soldiers and note regiment number to which they had belonged. Cool enough, we found them and wrote down their regiment numbers, then we looked up the new coordinates for the second stage. We plugged the numbers in and had our new coordinates which would lead us to the location of the actual cache.

This is when i discovered that the app I had did not include the ability to add a new waypoint to the map. I fiddled with several other apps i had downlaoded trying to find a way to put a waypoint on a map and get a heading from my current location. No dice.

I tried to find a new app that would do what was needed, but by now, there was no 3G connection available and the Android marketplace doesn’t run so well on AT&T’s Edge Connection, and i spent more time on this.

by now the kids are getting bored and frustrated with the lack of momentum. I’m starting to get a little edgy with the chatter while I’m trying to come up with a solution.

Finally i loaded up my compass app, figuring i should be able to figure out a direction and a distance from the two points I have, when i notice that the compass also displays my current GPS Coordinates. Cool, I can just start waklking and watch the numbers, right?

Wrong, the compass must be closed and restarted to obtain a refresh, and this method isn’t working at all when you have ADD and two kids under 6 who are already downgrading their estimation of your cool factor by the second.

So I do a last ditch desperation check of the geocaching app to see if there is something that can help that I had missed. And there it is. It is displaying my coordinates… I walks a little ways and the numbers update. Sweet. We are cooking without grease (it’s healtier that way apparently) now.

So we start walking, because the instructions say that we won’t need to get back in the car to find stage two. Gonna be a breeze now, right?

Wrong. I pass the longitude twice without noticing it somehow, and dispite walking all the way back to the highway at the Cemetary entrance I can’t get far enough along to find the correct lattitude. I’m a full minute or so off, it seems.

By now the kids are in open rebellion and if I don’t do something soon, I’ll be cast overboard to eke out a living and breed with the natives as best I can like some latter day CPT. Cook. I have to do something fast.

“Hey, who wants to go play on the slides at mcDonnalds and have some chicken nuggets”, I ask.

Ah, sweet redemption. I’m cool dad again for a little while.

So back home, alone with my shame, I downlaod a couple more apps and check the coordinates. Everything seems to be working, except, suddenly the Bloomfield Cemetary is 7,337 miles away, which puts it somewhere in China. How odd is that?

Okay, so the app had gotten confused and switched from West to East. Easy enough to fix, but the numbers still just aren’t matching up right.

It is another hour before I figure out I had spent an entire day working with degrees, minutes and seconds on my GPS software and degrees, minutes and fractions on paper. Seconds, of course, are sixty units to a minute while fractions are one hundred units. Enough of a difference that nothing seems to make sense when you are trying to find a fraction value with a minute scale.

So, long and short is, next couple times out with the kids we are going to do single stage caches so that there is some instant gratification for them and I’m going to go do a couple multi stage caches alone to make sure I have my tools down and can use them correctly. Then we’ll try some more multi stage ones together.

K’tala, in particular, really did seem to enjoy the finding the new coordinates part, and both of them woud have enjoyed the whole experience more had we found the cache.

As for me, I’m hooked. I’ll be out geocahing alone if no one wants to go with me. It’s interesting, will lead me to place i probably would not go otherwise, will allow me to satisfy the adventure/wanderlust aspect of my makeup without living on the road and it’s going to be some great exercise to boot.