We got our gps unit back a couple of days ago, we were going through geocaching withdrawal I believe. We had planned on doing a huge geocaching thing on our way to Illinois but we didn't have our gps unit :( I think if Alex doesn't have to work tomorrow we're going to go out and get a few geocaches.
The unit seems to be working alright but I had to fight with the darn thing to get it to unlock properly. I'm still not even sure I did it right. I guess we'll know for sure when we go out again :)
OK, I'm intrigued by all this geocaching stuff now. What GPS unit do you have? Are there any low-cost ones that are good? I have a TomTom for the car, but it looks like I'd need something more portable to take part.
That's so funny that you ask, I happen to be loading our GPS with geocaches just as you posted your comment :)
We have a Garmin eTrex Legend Cx. Garmin seems to be the most popular and we're pretty pleased with it. Ours is a little more top of the line than most, although we've really taken to the color screen and routing capabilities which we can also use in the car.
One of our other geocaching friends has the same model as us, but our other two have just a plain Garmin eTrex Legend (no Cx at the end), I believe. These have black and white screens but they're also really nice and equally good for geocaching. On the road we like to use our city map to get to the general location (sometimes we go as far as using Google Earth to determine the best parking and plug in those coords), although once you're in the vicinity all you need is the compass part of the GPS and any unit will have that available to you.
A good base map will get your started, more detailed maps usually cost a lot more money (ours came with a North American city navigator map, which was a great deal), but you can get by without it.
While also not necessary, a PDA (or device with an eBook reader) is also helpful, the pro accounts on geocaching.com let you download the cache information to a handheld device. It's on our list of things to get because printing out all of the cache sheets is a bit time consuming and it's becoming cumbersome as we move quickly from cache to cache.
The whole thing is a lot of fun! All you really need is a handheld GPS, and once you got that you're pretty much good to go. It's absolutely addicting though! Have fun if you do get started with it!