geocaching

Fun in Utah: Arches National Park

One of the rare holidays we receive is Columbus Day. (Seriously?) I’d planned to spend a four-day weekend visiting Arches National Park, when I found some vacation “under the couch,” and extended it to a whole ten days, then added destinations onto that. The plan was to fly to Salt Lake City Friday evening, spend […]

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Michigan – Part 2

(Notes to self, Continued from part 1.) Sault Ste Marie – I’d originally planned to spend a full day in Sault Ste Marie, but that fell apart when I opted to go to Mackinac Island the second time.  Since I had to claim my Ontario geocaching souvenir, I crossed the border to hike on Whitefish Island

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Michigan – part 1

Finding a time that all of the family schedules line up, and is not so last-minute that activities are sold out or excessively expensive, led to an over-accumulation of vacation time at the end of the year.  As I’m less a fan of “losing vacation time” than “vacationing in winter,” I’d take a few days off,

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Mid-Atlantic Countryside

Well that was an enjoyable week!   88 geocaches in 6 states (DC, DE, MD, NJ, PA, WV) with 375 miles of biking (and some Ubering) over 9 days.  Highlights were the guided tours of Gettysburg, PA (by a professional guide) and Washington, DC monuments (local, at night). Pre-trip: This was about as bad shape as

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Geobiking Philly to DC

The excitement of visiting colleges with my daughter, her applying to the short list, and waiting on the results has is over and I’m seriously craving a week unplugged from work.   I’ll be taking an organized ride in October from Philadelphia to Washington, DC.  Since these trips are as much about seeing different things as the Zen of

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50k elevation challenge

After 3 3/4 years, I finally completed the 50k elevation challenge (for geocaching) in October with my friend Jes. I logged far more than than 50k of elevation over the period, but the challenge had so many rules that many of my hikes didn’t count.  In fact, for a while I had kind of given up even tracking gain.  I

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Library geocaches

My friend Rachael tweeted about a library geocache presentation during her Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) event.  I was looking back among the geocaches I’ve done and found quite a few of them among my favorites: By George was my first library geocache, done during a conference visit to Penn State University.   The multi-cache

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Mac FizzyCalc

During the summer of 2011, I had some mythical Spare Time to blow the centimeter-thick layer of dust off my programming skills and port FizzyCalc, a Windows-based geocoordinate conversion utility that I’ve used for solving several puzzles in my obsessive hobby, geocaching, to the Mac. Mac FizzyCalc celebrated its 2500th download in November, a year

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