Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Hmmmm...

Last week I helped a landowner find old fence fragments around his timber so he could mark his nearly vanished boundaries. We spent most of the day navigating with a compass, and we double checked our location once in a while with pocket GPS unit. The fence fragment above was inside of the stump of a collapsed tree, and the wire would have been nailed up about 100 years ago.
I was checking pockets in my coat on the drive home and stopped to take inventory when I realized my GPS was missing. I had to think a few minutes, and realized that the last time I used it I had probably missed the inside coat pocket I used, and had dropped it in the woods soon after. I turned around, went back to the timber, and quickly navigated to the spot where I had last taken a GPS reading. I found the unit about forty feet out on the track I had made through the leaves. I told EJ about this close call when we talked that night, and his question was, "If you could navigate right back to it, why do you even bother carrying it?" I'm still trying to come up with an intelligent answer.

2 comments:

  1. I have that exact unit (X2).

    Like with guns...It ain't a question of NEED, it's a question of WANT.

    We carry them because they're fun gadgets. :)

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  2. One of the neat things it will do is measure acreage if you walk all the way around an area. Of course it is usually quicker to just pace off the width and length for the acreage. It is also good for checking speedometers.

    That's a nice truck you have. We just got a leased Explorer with 20,000 miles on it. Our old van was taking up too much of my time on the weekends.

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