Going Paperless

We celebrated a geocaching milestone yesterday. (Details at Bullwinkle's place.) In addition to picking up a "big round number" cache, for the first time we cached without any paper.

Our one and only complaint about caching has been the inordinate amount of time required to prepare for each caching outing. Every cache in the world has its own page at geocaching.com. And, each page contains gobs of information, from coordinates to descriptions to log entries to helpful hints when you need them. Capturing all of that information for use in the field has been a bit of trial and error for us over the years. We've written pages of notes, compiled Excel spreadsheets, and printed off sheets and sheets of cache pages (and sometimes even bound them into little notebooks). No matter which method you choose, it involves a lot of paper. In the last year or so, we've been able to download coordinates directly from the site to our GPS receiver, but we've continued to tote the paper to provide all of the other info (especially the hints). 

On our emancipation day, we had to turn in all of our company equipment, which included our cell phones. That afternoon, we headed straight for the Apple store and treated ourselves to two cute little i-phones. Since then, we've had a blast playing with these amazing little computers. One of our favorite spots is the App Store, which offers thousands of titles that offer fun and excitement. Over 1 billion apps have been downloaded in the store's first nine months, and we understand why. 

Yesterday, we downloaded the Groundspeak geocaching app. With one click, we greatly improved our caching productivity. And, that's the kind of stuff we care about these days! Now we have everything we used to search for and print from our home computer available to us on the i-phone.  

From here on out, our caching will be paper-free. And, we'll double the number of caches we have today in half the time. 

How very efficient!