The DeLorme Weblog » DeLorme Sales

Team DeLorme at the Teva Mountain Games!

DeLorme Sales — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 14:23:54 +0000

This weekend, June 5-7, Team DeLorme is teaming up with Outside magazine to bring geocaching to the Teva Mountain Games in Vail, CO.

Thousands of people will descend on Vail for three days of sports, music, art, and fun. DeLorme will be in Gear Town all weekend demonstrating and selling the Earthmate PN-40 to all comers. On Saturday, June 6, we’ll be running a geocaching event where you can win great prizes from DeLorme and Outside, including one of three Earthmate PN-40 GPS devices!

DeLorme and Outside are hosting the geocaching event from 10am until 4pm. We will have PN-40s to lend out that are preloaded with the special Teva Mountain Games caches that we’ll be placing in various spots around the games’ many different venues.

Come on out to Vail for a fun weekend of mountain sports and music, go geocaching, win prizes, and try out the Earthmate PN-40! See you there!

-Brian

Posted in Fun Stuff, PN-40 News Tagged: GPS, PN-40, Technology, Teva Mountain Games

DeLorme Earthmate GPS PN-40 Online Press Kit Available

DeLorme Sales — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 19:55:32 +0000

Media Members and Bloggers – PN-40 Online Press Kit:

The Earthmate PN-40 press release and online press kit can be found here. The DeLorme media contact person is Charlie Conley.

Posted in PN-40 News

PN-40 at Outdoor Retailer Show

DeLorme Sales — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:20:01 +0000

The DeLorme sales team was at the 2008 Outdoor Retailer (OR) Summer Market Show this past week. Tom, Jim, Dave, and I enjoyed 6 great days out in Salt Lake City. We had excellent weather and made the best of it by getting out for a few mountain bike rides in the Park City area . (See my crash video below!)

The show itself has 2 days of the Open Air Demo at Pineview Reservoir in Ogden, UT, about an hour north of SLC. The focus there is on the paddlesports vendors, but it?s a great opportunity to play with GPS devices, seeing as how the rest of the show is held indoors at the Salt Palace. Lots of people came to the DeLorme booth, undoubtedly drawn in by our ‘Serious Tool’ t -shirts and stickers, and all were excited to get a chance to see the PN-40 in action.

Back at the Salt Palace for the second half of the show we made a bit of a splash with a presentation at our booth on Saturday by polar explorer John Huston, who has been a fan of the PN-20 and will be taking the PN-40 with him on his next expedition to the North Pole in March of ?09. He and his partner Tyler Fish will be attempting to be the first Americans to reach the pole unsupported, using skis as form of transport. More on John and the expedition at www.northpole09.com.

Overall the show was a great time and a great success for DeLorme.

Riding and Caching or Danielle’s First Cache

DeLorme Sales — Mon, 05 May 2008 13:44:56 +0000

During a recent beautiful weekend in southern Maine, Danielle and I decided to take a nice long bike ride and have a picnic lunch down by the water where we usually launch our kayaks. The PN-20 spent most of the ride in its pouch attached to the shoulder strap of my pack, as we knew the area pretty well. I still kept it on to record the track, so that we can know how far and long we’d ridden.

We were riding home, but, not wanting to call it a day just yet, I conveniently remembered that there are a few geocaches in the area, and I easily convinced Danielle to do a little caching. We had tried to grab a couple of caches over the winter, unsuccessfully, and she was starting to get a bit discouraged with the whole idea. The name of the cache we decided to go after is “Percheron” which, Danielle informed me, is a breed of horse.

The cache is located just off the trail network that is part of Crystal Springs Farm in Brunswick, ME. This is an amazing local farm which hosts our local farmer’s market.

We stashed our bikes near the trailhead and Danielle lead the way with the PN-20. She used the find function to locate the cache, and then selected the direct route option and followed the heading to within about 20 feet of the cache.

After a few minutes of poking around and searching we decided to look at the hint in the comments. The hint definitely helped us out and 30 seconds later Danielle had discovered her first cache!

She was very excited, as you can see. We signed the log book and headed home so the she could log the cache for Team DeLorme at Geocaching.com. All in all it was another great day, enhanced a bit by the PN-20.

-Brian

Running Around Green Bay, WI

DeLorme Sales — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 14:23:48 +0000

Lambeau Field, home of the Green Bay Packers, was home to the annual Mills Fleet Farm Spring Sports and Outdoors Show last weekend. I was on hand to represent DeLorme and answer questions about the PN-20 and our ever-popular Atlas and Gazetteer.

It was a great show full of friendly people and the weather in Green Bay was gorgeous, something only a Mainer can say this time of year.

I travel a fair amount in support of DeLorme and the PN-20, and I enjoy talking to people in different parts of the country. I meet a lot of very nice people everywhere I go, but Green Bay was about the friendliest city I’ve been to yet. Maybe it had something to do with the excellent selection of in-house microbrews on tap and cask at Title Town Brewing Company. This place was a true find. If you are headed to Green Bay and appreciate good beer it is not to be missed.

I also realized while in Green Bay that I have a 5K race to run in about a month and that I need to start running more. I take the PN-20 with me on runs so that I can use it to track my distance, speed, and time, and to ensure that I actually arrive back at the hotel. Here is the run I went on in Green Bay, with the track transferred into Topo USA and the profile displayed, and then shared using the Mapshare feature.

My Run in Green Bay

Next week I’m in Denver, CO. Running there will be training at altitude for me. More posts from the road soon!

-Brian

Cache-In Trash-Out Geocaching Event at DeLorme HQ!

DeLorme Sales — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 21:58:52 +0000

It’s time to wake up the bears!

On Saturday, April 19th, join geocachers from around the state and New England at DeLorme HQ in Yarmouth, Maine, as part of the International Cache-In Trash-Out Environmental Initiative (CITO). We are planning a day of fun, food, prizes, and geocaching. DeLorme is the sole sponsor of this year’s CITO initiative, which takes place around the world in recognition of Earth Day.

For those who don’t know, geocaching is a sort of hide and seek game using handheld GPS receivers, like the Earthmate GPS PN-20, to locate a cache hidden by a fellow geocacher. Sometimes caches contain knick-knacks or a trackable item designed to move from cache to cache. Each cache contains a log book, as well as an online log on the geocaching.com website. There are a couple of caches here on DeLorme property, including one maintained by Team DeLorme called Bears in the Bushes. Eartha itself is a virtual cache.

Geocaching is great fun for families with kids of all ages. Come join us and bring the family for some great outdoor fun. Feel free to stop by just to visit or stay for the day. Team DeLorme members and bloggers Chip Noble and Brian Danz will be on hand from 10am until 4pm.

Event information

See you on the 19th!

-Brian and Chip

City Caching

DeLorme Sales — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 21:05:56 +0000

This weekend found me in New York, NY. I know that I live in Maine and that as such I am a bit, shall we say, removed from the mainstream, but every time I come to this city I am baffled by the sheer magnitude of it. For the record, I’m no hick living in the boonies, I grew up in Boston and I’m no stranger to city life. New York is simply an entirely different world though.

My best friend, Robby, grew up in Manhattan, near Times Square, and he still lives in the neighborhood he grew up in. He is a gracious host whenever I’m in town, and I am grateful for the “tour guide”. He’s good about taking me to the best local places for food and such, its great to get the NYC experience from a true New Yorker.

Whenever I travel I try to grab a geocache or two, and I thought it would be really cool to take Robby geocaching. He is the kinda guy who will never need a GPS in his life, not if they don’t have subway maps on them. I told him about geocaching, and he was, in true NYC fashion, both cynical and skeptical of it. “A treasure hunt?” he said “Am I gonna have to dig around some tree in Central Park or something?” I assured him that no excavations would be necessary, downloaded a few caches into Topo USA, edited the comments to get what I wanted, transferred them into the PN-20 and we set off for a little concrete caching in the urban canyon. I turned off all the POI’s so that the map wouldn’t be too cluttered and we headed east.

The apparent trick with caching in such an uber-urban environment is size and stealth. All the posts I’d read noted that it can be difficult to be subtle and unnoticed when seeking a cache say, near the corner of Broadway and 5th Ave, and there aren’t exactly an abundance of places to hide a standard size cache, therefore most of the caches are small or “micro”, trickier to find, but by no means impossible. I thought that the tricky part was going to be actually finding and logging the caches without drawing an inordinate amount of attention upon ourselves. I also had the thought that we might look extra suspicious to the abundance of NYPD officers in the area. I was not looking to have to explain why I was hiding a little box in a public space to a cop.

I had, however, forgotten the fact that nothing looks odd to a New Yorker, a knowledge which Robby took full advantage of. In searching for one cache he was basically climbing around on a piece of industrial artwork in a small park in the Chelsea neighborhood. This was when I realized city-boy skeptic Robby had gotten into the “treasure hunt”. While this was a gratifying moment for me, it was not brought to full fruition due to the fact that we were unable to actually locate the cache. In reviewing the logs I’d read that several other cachers had been unable to find it over the previous few days. Noting that the space between the artwork and the wall behind it was apparently someone’s “home”, we decided that the probability of this cache being corrupted was pretty high, and moved on.

The second cache we were going after was in the Flatiron district, a short walk away. The hints were very important on this one; unfortunately I did a poor job editing the comments and the last couple of hints were cut off on the PN-20. Robby was holding the answer in his hands: IPhone. I sat on a nearby bench and signed into Geocaching.com to view the hints while Robby went running around with the PN-20, getting as close to the cache as possible. I thought that a fun role reversal. We were successful in locating and logging the cache, and Robby decided that Geocaching was cool and tried to hit me up for a PN-20. I told him I might be able to get him a good price.

Our caching for the day completed we headed off for Chinatown in search of excellent fried dumplings. I was tempted to use the PN-20 to do a POI search, but I relied on Robby’s instincts instead. I was not disappointed.

Until next time…

-Brian

Day Hike with the PN-20

DeLorme Sales — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 13:44:00 +0000

Back in November, I found myself with friends at Camden Hills State Park in Camden, Maine.

This is one of my favorite spots for a day hike. There are beautiful overlooks with views of offshore islands and the town of Camden. They have an excellent campground as well. We were a bit surprised to find a light coating of snow on the ground, which turned into a couple of inches as we gained elevation.

It was a beautiful sunny day and the PN-20 had great reception. Nothing new there. I was able to convince my reluctant buddies to follow me on a bushwhack down a portion of the mountain. The PN-20 guided us reliably and when we hit the trail we were aiming for they were visibly relieved. They now have faith in GPS! I can’t wait for some serious snow to allow for some serious creative trail creation.

We capped the day off wonderfully with dinner at Moody’s diner in Waldoboro, ME. This is the real reason I come up the coast, thick chocolate frappes, grilled cheeses with bacon and , amazing deserts, yum yum yum. Moody’s is a quintessential diner, in operation since 1934. Be sure to make the stop if you are in the area, it is not to be missed.

Take it easy!

-Brian