Find Your Geocache: Product Review

May 3rd, 2011 |

Author: Kim

Guest Author: Review of Magellan eXplorist

My friend, Kris, was lucky enough to pick up a new GPS a few weeks ago: a Magellan eXplorist. Since I’m a die-hard Garmin fan, I asked her if she would write up a review of the eXplorist for the Find Your Geocache blog.

If you’re ready to buy, or want more info, here’s a link to Magellan eXplorist on Amazon.com.

Here it in, in Kris’ own words:

Paperless Geocaching

I have been talking for years about geocaching and my family. Geocaching is a high-tech treasure hunting that my girlfriend Kim of TheOutdoorPrincess.com introduced us to many years ago. With geocaching, you use a GPS, enter in the coordinates and search for a hidden treasure.

Sometimes those treasures are as simple as a piece of paper that you sign your name on, other times there are little trinkets that you can exchange with your own. Some of the neatest geocaches that our family has found contain travel bugs or geocoins that you can take, move to another location and track online.

There is a local cache just down the road from us that has a history lesson in it that includes a newpaper article. We use geocaching as part of our PE for homeschooling.

Last month, our family researched new GPSs and came across one by Magellan. The eXplorist GC is specifically made for geocaching and you can load on caches that you want to find right from your computer and the geocaching.com website. It is waterproof (perfect for our family of 7) so that we can take it on our camping trips and not worry that the 5 year old is growing the drop it in a stream, after all 5-year old boys are addicted to throwing rocks into water!

To get started with this GPS, you will need to download the driver to your computer. Visit the geocaching.com site and look for local caches. On the individual cache pages, there is a download to GPS button. Click it and follow the directions. (Here’s an article on Loading Caches Directly to a GPS) It’s that easy!! The geocache coordinates are now on your GPS!!!

With the eXplorist GC, you can mark the ones that you have found, add comments, view the entire file, including comments, hints and description right from your GPS on location. Then you come back to your computer and download the file and it updates your finds and comments online!

NO MORE PRINTING!!

And it is easy enough for a 9-year old to figure out! We are thrilled to find this GPS for our family!!

(Just recently in the news – a local Prescott Geocacher found an INTACT Yavapai Indian pot – check out the post on The Outdoor Princess’ Find Your Geocache tips and tricks blog)

Remember too that Geocaching in a low-cost FUN activity for your family. You can find GPSs on craigslist for inexpensive. Found mine online on AMAZON.com for less than $150. We pack a picnic lunch and plan our caches in order to save on gas money. And you get to SPEND time as a family OUTSIDE!