Depending on how many caches we are going after, planning an expedition route may take up to two hours for me. I know that using a smartphone would allow me to plan the trip “on the fly,” saving a lot of prep time. I think that geocaching would be the only reason that I would want a smartphone, and I can’t justify the expense just for a hobby!
My preferred search method lately has been to use the Pocket Query feature. It allows me to quickly identify caches in an area that meet certain requirements. For example, when we were on our sprint to get to 1000 finds, quick numbers were important; wasting time searching for caches that may or may not be there is frustrating, so I only searched for active caches in that area that had been found in the last week.
Also, you can search by attribute. I’ve used this feature mostly on our winter hunts. Not every cache owner marks their caches as “available in winter” when they really are, so I click on the snowflake attribute a second time to exclude caches that are marked as “NOT available in winter.” I figure that if the cache owner has gone to the trouble of indicating that it could not be hunted in the snow, I won’t include it in a winter cache run. However, if I only searched for caches that were marked as “available in winter,” I would miss a LOT of caches that the cache owners did not mark with that attribute, even though they were available. This approach works most of the time, but we will still come across some caches that are NOT available in the winter and not marked as “Not Available in Winter” because the cache owner takes the approach of only using the attributes to mark the winter-friendly hides as such. A review of the logs on that cache will help determine if it is accessible in winter or not. If you notice a lack of entries (or a string of DNF entries) during the winter months…. there’s a good chance it’s not winter-friendly!
After I have saved a query, I will preview the query in Google Maps. From there, I’ll study the roads and plan out how I want to run the route. I try to avoid backtracking and left turns onto busy roads. I then open up my finds logsheet template in Excel, and fill in the cache names on that sheet in the order that I want to hunt them in.  I print this sheet off and put it on the clipboard. Now all I have to fill in on the sheet throughout the day is time of find and any notes I want to remember.
Now I download the GPX file and import it into GSAK. I set a filter in GSAK to sort by date of GPX file (set for “equal to” today’s date). I set user flags for current filter only (Ctrl + F6), then I send the selected caches to the GPS. I also create a custom POI for the Garmin POI Loader to put onto the Nüvi. This gives us two GPS units to use on the hunt – one for the car and one handheld. We can always pull the Nüvi out for use as a second handheld if needed.
If I were picking which cache to go after next on the hunt based off of the loaded cahes on the GPSr, just going for the next closest one does not always make for the most efficient use of time and fuel – there’s often a lot of back and forth when you take that approach! Although it’s a great way to get to know your way around a new neighborhood!