I didn't pick up the maps, they cost nearly as much as the unit
Perhaps in the future I will look into it. Mine takes chips as well. There are a few initiatives around for the Calgary trail system which would be open source. I might be waiting it get a windows machine to do that though. It was a large pain to get it working with linux.
I went out yesterday. Found 2, failed on another and turned around on the last one, which was an earth cache, simply because the location was teeming with teenagers.
I climbed through bush, down a steep steep grade, got eaten by mosquitos. All without going more than 3 or 4 km from home.