- OK, I'm new here, so some introductions are necessary. A good friend introduced Karyn (aka ruthie44) and me (aka timotab) to geocaching. We bid for, and won, a Garmin eTrex on eBay, but we just couldn't wait for it to arrive. Firstly, I headed out to find a local cache to me, just using the maps of the cache to find it. Incidental note here, I found the cache needed some maintenance, so tried to email the owner, but the email bounced, and he had not been on the website for several months. I emailed this info to TPTB and offered to look after it. SO, for now, it's in my name, until the real owner speaks up... Anyway, today (Jan 2) is my wife's birthday, so we planned to go caching for the day. Problem - the eTrex was not yet here. A quick call to the friend, and he lent us his very nice Magellan Meridian GPS. So, Thursday eveing, I looked at how to use it, and set up some waypoints for our visit. By hand, as he doesn't ahve a data cable. We wanted to be out of Metro St Louis, so I decided we'd go to SPringfield IL. I set up a total of 15 waypoints, so we'd have more than enough to do. We gathered together some trinkets for swapping, and set out. First Karyn tried the cache I "own", and found it with little difficulty. Then we went for it and headed out of town. We didn't really make it to Springfield proper - a large amount of our time was spent trying to find the park a particular cache was in, and failing miserably, as we didn't know the name of the park/reserve. We kept getting close, but with lots of lake in the way, it was difficult to get there. Oh well. However, we did find 7 caches of the 8 we actually looked for. THe other 7 we discarded due to time constraints or because the location would have been closed by the time we got there. On our travels, we picked up three TBs, and dropped off one of them. The other two were both turtles (male and female), and I have yet to drop them off anywhere. Are there any TB hotels in the StL area? I did a search on hotel, but failed to find one. Surely with 70, 55, and a hub airport there should be one somewhere here? One cache not too far from St Louis that I highly recommend is Ringing in Agriculture [GCGA1T]. It's a great cache, and one I will be returning to. I don't want to spoil all the fun, but do go and check it out. One last thing, if/when you meet me, you might notice that I come from a little bit east of St Louis :) Timothy **************************************************************************** Our WebPage! Http://WWW.GeoStL.com Mail List Info. //www.freelists.org/cgi-bin/list?list_id=geocaching Mail List FAQ's: //www.freelists.org/help/questions.html **************************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list: send an email to geocaching-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'unsubscribe' in the Subject field