Geocaching Series #2

Travel Bug Feature Stories

I have decided that I am going to run a series on my favorite aspect of geocaching, the most exciting part of it for me (some days): Trackable Items. I am going to feature a different trackable item each time and maybe if you haven't caught the fever yet, you will understand why they are so addictive.
Trackable items are items that can be tracked by the geocaching website. They have individual ID numbers that can be entered in the website by the user to log an entry on the item's page. On the item's webpage, you can view a map of where they have traveled, and see the total miles traveled. You can also read the logs by other users, some that might be a simple movement log or some that share a story or experience related to the traveling item. It is kinda like the "Traveling Gnome", for people who are familiar with that but not geocaching trackables. People can also take pictures of the item and upload the photo to the website, and each item can be assigned a "mission", an objective to accomplish during their travels. The primary unstated mission of a trackable item is simply to keep traveling, from person to person and cache to cache. Each time a log is written on the item, an email is sent to the item's owner, who purchased the trackable item and activated it under their account with a special code.
Trackable items come in different varieties. The two most common varieties at this point in the game are "travel bugs", which are special dog tags made by Groundspeak (the company behind geocaching) that have the special individual ID engraved on them, and geocoins, made by various companies that have to pay extra for the trackable function with Groundspeak. The travel bug has an identifiable icon on the website that shows up next to a cache when it is logged in it properly, and also shows up on a user's profile when they have made a log entry for it. The geocoins have individual icons for each different type, so some people (like me) like to collect these virtual icons on their profile by "discovering" and moving as many as these coins as possible.

On each player's profile under the "trackables" section, on the left it will show the icons of all the ones the player has logged and on the right it will show all the ones that the player owns. I own 50 of these items myself. As you can see, I am a bit of an addict. Today I want to feature my very first one I "released into the wild".

One of my first introductions to travel bugs was at GeoWoodstock IV. I was a newbie player and I seated myself right next to the "Travel Bug Festival" so I could figure out what the heck was going on. I ended up buying myself a travel bug tag of my very own (average cost: about $5) from the Groundspeak shop set up for the weekend before I went home, and spent the weekend trying to decide what I was going to do with it.

What I decided to do was to take a picture of my family, alter it slightly, then laminate it and send it out with the mission to race our real family to Bend, Oregon, where we want to move one day. At this time in our lives, my husband was in this "Bend or Bust" mentality, where he felt either we move to Bend or he was just going to die or be miserable, he wanted it so bad. I decided to name this bug "Our Family".I printed out the mission information and laminated it on the backside of the picture, and then attached the dog tag to it. I released this bug in our first geocache hide, being the closest one to our house and eventually our "travel bug home base".

It was dropped in this first cache on 6/13/06, and on 6/24/06 a traveling geocacher came in from Colorado and took it home with him. I thought this was so fitting, since my husband and I met in Colorado. He dropped it in a cache in a remote area of the San Juan mountains, though, so I was worried it would sit there forever waiting for a ride. Luckily, within a week the cache owner came by on a maintenance run and took the TB, dropping it in New Mexico. Off we went!

The great thing about this TB is not only was it our first, but it was also the first one to reach its goal. It made it to Bend, OR in about a year and a half. It actually made it to Oregon in six months, but then somebody thought it was a good idea to move it contrary to its goal and took it to Montana, and then it moved through Wyoming, back into Montana, and then, get this, a first time geocacher picks it up and takes it directly to Bend. The cache they dropped it in when they got to Bend is their very first logged find! Isn't that crazy?

So here we are, our picture, looking out around us in Bend. The real us is still stuck here in Houston dreaming of Oregon mountains. The TB us has been sitting in the cache for three months, but it seems that most Oregon cachers like to wait for the snow to melt to get serious about caching. That was my impression when visiting the area over Christmas. The TB was discovered last week, so I feel comfortable it is still there. No one has added photos to the page, but here is one of the local wildlife around the cache site. Apparently these deer are fairly docile and don't scare easily (which actually concerns me, having helped repair torn chests on dogs caused by the antlers of bucks just like this who are not scared off easily).

So, this bug traveled 6620 miles in about seventeen months, made its goal, and I could not be happier about it! After reaching Bend, my idea was for people to take "us" caching in the area with them and show us their favorite caches, but I have also put a tag on all my bugs' pages requesting "Take me to GeoWoodstock IV". I want to see how many of my 50 bugs end up there, and take home the ones that do for retirement, repairs, or a new mission. So, perhaps I will see this bug again at GW6, or perhaps I will see it again in Bend one day, but I do hope we will be reunited once more.