Geo Anxiety
By Kyle Fletcher
Geo-tagged information is blowing up. Photos, status updates, and videos are all being tagged with geo data. Applications are embracing this and even specializing in applying geographic data to our lives. This is exciting. One could potentially look back and trace their literal steps. Or not.
little walk
I initially set out to go find a cache on my campus but sadly I could not reach it. It still was a nice walk cause I got to chill by a stream while the sun went down. Also, on the way back I saw two graffiti artists in action. Argus was one of them! I have mad respect for his work and to put a face to a tag is pretty freaking cool. Now I’m getting ready to go to the hookah bar with some friends. Life is pretty good right now.
Swamps, sheep, and cats, oh my! - 25, August, 2011
Today was our day to geocache. Peter and I (because I still owe Tinus money) split the cost of a GPS, and this was the first time we were going to use it.
Tinus and Peter mostly had control over the GPS, so they know better how it all works, but it seemed to do just fine. Today, we were on the hunt for two caches in Asperen. One was a multicache, and the other was labeled a “Letter box hybrid”, but it seemed to work like a multicache. A multicache is a geocache that has several steps involved. The coordinates that you get online are only for the starting point. After that, there are two options: 1. You must solve questions or riddles using information from your current surroundings to find the numbers for the coordinate of the cache, or 2. You must find small cache-clues that give you hints to where the end cache is.
We decided to try to find the cache that was supposed to be in or near a swamp first. We had a very rough time with this one, and I will tell you right now we didn’t find it.
The first set of coordinates given were for a starting point, at which place you can park your bike. We accidentally skipped this one, and ended up riding our bikes close to where the first part of the cache was supposed to be. We were up on the road, and the cache was somewhere in a thicket of trees on the other side and down an embankment. We saw a spot at the side of the road which looked like a good place to put our bikes. I went to park my bike first.
There was a lot of tall grass and nettle here, which gave the illusion of a slightly sloping area, completely hiding the fact that this was a steep, prickly hill of doom. I started to wheel my bike off to the side, and before I knew what was going on, started careening down the hill uncontrollably, crashing through all that lovely nettle. Mind you, I was wearing shorts today, because it was hot and humid and I decided that I would rather deal with a few possible scratches then die of heat exhaustion. At this point, I was really really really wishing I had chose to wear pants, because oh my lord, did this sting. Tinus asked why I didn’t use the handbrakes or, you know, let go of my bike. One, I didn’t think to actually use my bike’s handbrakes until the very end, and two, I was practically running, and I think that if I had let go of my bike then, I probably would have tripped over it, and then would have really had something to complain about.
