What handheld GPS would you buy and why?

Question

I am looking for a handheld GPS unit that I can do three things with 1) go exploring in the woods 2) Get into Geocaching 3) take a trip to Europe or other places that I've never been and be able to find my way home.

Answer 1

I bought a Garmin eTrex Legend. I use it for Geocaching, and I've also used it for finding my way around and as an aviation navigation backup. I chose it because of the cost and features. It has a basic road map built in, but you can upgrade it by uploading street level maps to it. It only has enough memory to hold a single metro area at street level at a time but there are other newer versions which take removable memory cards for a bit more money but will hold as much as you need them to without breaking the bank on a TomTom or the like. Like other GPS's, it does the breadcrumb tracking so you can see where you've been and retrace your steps back. It's helped me many times in the woods and for Geocaching as well finding my way back out on some of the harder caches, some taking me 26km to get to and back! Even with the base map, I've gotten myself out of trouble when my normal route in a strange town was blocked by an accident, I could see where the next exit on the highway was and how I could get to it from the previous exit.