This topic contains 9 replies, has 7 voices, and was last updated by 
uws22 11 years, 5 months ago.
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I am getting the wonderful opportunity to travel on a river cruise with my brother and mom for her 90th birthday. Any caching will of course be limited to wherever we have ports of call, but I certainly hope to try. We’ll be in Germany, Austria and Hungary. Other than language issues (I used to be conversationally fluent in German, used to being key) will my Garmin work as usual there? Anything else I might need to know? Thanks. I have plenty of overseas travel experience, but none related to caching.
@Trekkin and Birdin wrote:
I am getting the wonderful opportunity to travel on a river cruise with my brother and mom for her 90th birthday. Any caching will of course be limited to wherever we have ports of call, but I certainly hope to try. We’ll be in Germany, Austria and Hungary. Other than language issues (I used to be conversationally fluent in German, used to being key) will my Garmin work as usual there? Anything else I might need to know? Thanks. I have plenty of overseas travel experience, but none related to caching.
Your Garmin will work just fine. You probably don’t have maps for Europe, but I am guessing you are not driving anyway. I have cached in Spain, Morocco, France, Portugal, Indonesia, Taiwan, Russia, Ukraine without maps and done just fine. Be sure to check out the caches ahead of time – in case they are not in English. You can do a Google translate prior to your trip to make sure you understand what you need to know.
The views expressed here are that of myself only and do not necessarily represent that of the WGA board.
Thanks Marie. My brother’s phone is probably set to work over there as well, so I might have him resurrect his gc account ahead of time…just in case!
just scan across and zoom in on your base map and take a look next time you fire it up. I didn’t really plan ahead when we were in France, just figured I’d load them in before each city and scout the cache pages to know the general area. Turns out, I had city streets just like I do here. although mine is a Magellan…
Also, if you are in any touristy type area, it’s pretty likely there will be plenty of cache pages with both languages already in place. I found 30 caches in France, and all but 2 had English descriptions.
I’ve cached in Germany, Austria and Hungary and had no problem with my Garmin picking up signals and getting me to the cache. Especially in touristy areas the cache pages are usually in English, or the native language plus English. If you’re going to Budapest in Hungary there are several caches right on the river walk along the Danube.
I was poking around the net yesterday and noticed Hungary has a very unique caching system separate from Groundspeak (not that there are no Groundspeak caches there). I think I was looking at cachepedia and saw the description there.
The best sig is no sig.
I should have said something when you mentioned Hungary. You will want to be very careful selecting your caches, as some people will create virtuals while calling them traditional caches to slip them past reviewers. On the geocaching.hu site, they will be clearly identified as virts, but on the geocaching.com site, there is no indication at all that there is no container. Unfortunately, the reviewers there don’t go a good job of keeping up with NA logs, so these often go for years before a reviewer finally notices and archives the listing. I’ve not seen this anywhere else (probably because you couldn’t get away with it anywhere else.)
That’s a really helpful insight, Deejay. I will have to plan ahead before departure, since we’re Luddites and don’t have one of them there smartphone thingies. I need to brush up on the area geography so searching on the maps for the stops isn’t such a challenge, but I have a few months yet. Given the nature of the trip, I won’t be able to do any of our hiking type stuff, but time spent with my mom and brother and his wife will more than make up for that! Thanks for all the info!
I’m also planning a few coffee dates with a local geocaching friend who’s from Germany to work on brushing up on those long lost language skills, which should be entertaining for her.
Not that I’m going, or planning to, but if in Europe, do you have to change the datum on your gps??
I didn’t change a single setting on mine and it worked.
My trip included France, Monaco, and Iceland.
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