Originally Posted by
dubord207
Sounds like the Palm and cachemate are the way to go. I googled paperless caching as Haffy suggested. Lots of articles with about ten steps or more to do this. Might be a bit more than my techno skills or lack thereof. My question is whether it really is all that easy? Di and I did 7 caches yesterday with clipboard and 2 Garmins in hands. One person that saw us wondered what kind of "survey" we were doing! I'm ready to get a Palm and will look to you folks and this site for technical and MORAL support!
I was just like you . . . well kind of . . . just a little shorter, fatter and with less hair on my head than you.
What I mean is I started out printing out cache information . . . and in fact I personally recommend that folks new to geocaching do just that instead of going out and buying a high winder, fancy (and in some cases daunting) Palm type device and going paperless. Once folks get the hang of geocaching and are doing it for a while and realize that this is a hobby they will stick with for a while then going paperless is most definitely a good thing . . . and I say this as a person who is a near Luddite when it comes to electronic gizmos (I don't even own a cell phone . . . my wife owns one . . . but we never use it and have no idea of what the phone number is even!)
Trust me . . . going paperless is much, much easier than doing the print-out thing . . . no more shuffling papers, losing papers, etc. The nice thing is you get all the info on the caches and can even do a search for other local caches to another cache . . . in other words if you're at a cache and want to do some more local caches you can do a search and it will present you with a list of other caches in the area.
The only couple of drawbacks that I see with paperless personally is that I only download the cache information once a week so if someone has disabled a cache and I'm relying on "old" information vs. printing out a page the day I go caching than I might be out of luck . . . that and I've had a few glitches here and there with my PDA which have somehow resolved on their own (i.e. incomplete information being downloaded.) All in all, I am quite happy going paperless.
I should also mention that when I'm going on a big caching trip I sometimes will run off a list of the caches I want to find so I know in what order I want to search for them . . . or in case my PDA dies on the trip. However, in most cases (i.e. one day caching trips) I just bring along my PDA and a list of the caches in the order I want to look for them.
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