Private Thoughts Made Public

After my brother told me all about Geocaching the other week (detailed here) I got all excited about it, and by the Sunday had bought myself a GPS unit via eBay. Cool stuff, couldn’t wait to get going. Then I got blitzed with a cold, and thought “just my luck, I’m about to do something different and exciting for a change and I can barely drag myself out of bed”. I needn’t have worried, however, because by yesterday my head had cleared, the GPS had arrived and had been tested, and the rain had even cleared itself off somewhere else for a while.
Armed with co-ordinates, directions and clues from the Geocaching site, and my shiny almost-new bright yellow GPS telling me where I was, how fast I was walking, where I was supposed to be going and how far above sea-level I was, I headed off all full of excitement and adventure. Let’s see what’s been hidden!
But alas, no luck. I got close to it, I’m sure I did. The clue made sense and fitted in with my surroundings, and the GPS told me I was within 20 feet of it, but could I actually find it? Could I buggery. I spent half an hour traipsing through mud and brambles, trying not to slide down the very steep slope into a stream. In the end I gave up, disappointed but not downhearted. I knew from reading the cache logs on the main Geocaching site that this was a tricky one to find, and other more experienced Geocachers hadn’t been able to find it the first time they tried either. I know it was last found a couple of weeks ago, so it was definately there then. Better luck next time.
So I turned around and walked home again. As I approached my house, I thought I’d test how accurate the GPS was, and the answer it seems is “not as accurate as I thought it would be”. While walking up the road and looking straight at my front door, it was telling me that I lived somewhere just off to the right, and by the time I actually got to my door it was saying that my house was actually supposed to be 400 feet behind me. So either this GPS lark isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, or else it didn’t have a good idea where it was when I marked in the position of my house. Further testing is required, it seems.
Still, I walked five and a half miles and got out of the house for a bit, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time.