I’ve been getting a bit lazy thanks to Google Earth. Just type in an address (works best in the
US) and you have the coordinates. Plug the coords into the GPS and you are
fine. I’m in the US at the moment and staying in a hotel I’ve not been in
before. So I googled for it, got the address, added that to google earth… And
turned my GPS on at Milbrae BART Station. The logic was simple, keep drivng
down the road until the the GPS tels you that you are there. Where it actually
put me was at the entrance to a pet store. Well at a tree in the car park
actually, which is why I had to check that I had been following the waypoint
for the hotel and not a geocache!
It turns out that Google was about 4 kilometers out. So after a quick chat with people in the pet
store, and a call to the hotel I was back on the road to the hotel.
Now that I have the full address and the exact zip code, google puts the hotel nearly a
kilometer away in the other direction! Both google and mapquest use NAVTEQ, yet
both give very different locations for the hotel. Mapquest is correct btw.
In other news, it is completely overcast in the Bay area. This is because I bought a PST. No not
another Patch Test group, Coronado’s Personal Solar Telescope. Hopefully it
will get some use tomorrow.
Tomorrow is for geocaching. But where to go? There are just too many caches in the US. 18 in a
1k radius from me at the moment. I think the geocaching experience in Ireland
is much better. We have a low cache density, but the overall quality is higher.
That said, I think I’ll spend most of tomorrow looking for some of the caches
on peoples favourite lists on geocaching.com rather than just notching up
numbers.