Newbie Geocacher

Alright, for her birthday recently I purchased a Garmin C530 GPS unit for my wife. I got a great price on the discontinued model. So far we love it. It's easy to use and gets us to our locations fast. One of the cool aspects of the 530 ( maybe other GPS's too ) is that you can find most local buisnesses by just clicking on them from a list... ie: restaurant>mexican>jose's. We really like that feature and expect it to guide us to some new and interesting places.

After purchasing the unit we discovered there is an activity called geocaching. Geocaching is a sport where you search for items ( usually a log book and a small token) with your GPS. These geocaches have been hidden on public land by other people interested in the sport. When you find the geocache, you sign the log book, take the token, and leave a new token. Then you put the geocache back in place. You can find the LAT/ LON (position)of these geocaches online.

After hearing about the sport we became interested to the point that we want to try it. My wife and I are not strangers to the outdoors. We spend much of our free time birding. In addition I'm very experienced with mapping and navigation.

Our first hurdle was realizing that our GPS does not give us LAT/ LON cooridnants. While we can enter the point we are looking for into the GPS via software on a PC we have no way to manually enter a point and search for the cache. This led us to the purchase of a handheld GPS. After searching EBAY I found a refurbished Garmin ETREX Legend. This is also a discontinued unit but we expect it to fill our needs. I've spent many hours the last few days reading the owners manual online so I somewhat understand this complicated unit. It has the ability to provide us with a ton of information.