TRAVEL BUG FEATURE STORY # 6
IT'S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL
I haven't written about travel bugs in a while. In fact, I had to go all the way back to last summer to see what feature # was next in the series I meant to write about my favorite ones. It's not that I am not as interested in them. In fact, I have a contest going on with my own right now that is kind of fun. I think I just moved on to other topics instead. Maybe I was having too much fun with my digital camera and telling stories to go along with all the pictures I've been taking.
Anyway something weird and wonderful happened to one of my travel bugs that I just have to share.
One of the very first travel bugs I ever made up and sent out into the world was Love Potion #8.5. It is a little vial of perfume with a charm hanging off it, something given to me by Pegah back in high school, and the name is sort of a joke about my husband and I's "not-quite-perfect" love spell. Anyway, I attached this item to the dog tag I bought off the website and sent it out with the goal of heading to Colorado Springs, where we met. I also outlined some very specific places I would love to have a picture of it in front of, places of significance in our relationship and the early months of our dating (like in front of the "Kissing Camels" rock in Garden of the Gods, where we had our first kiss).
Anyway, the bug managed to make it into the hands of a cacher who promised to take it to Colorado after three brief months, and after stopping in Arkansas and California along the way. I thought it would reach its goal really quickly. Then it didn't actually get dropped for several months, and then cachers started moving it the wrong direction in Colorado. Then, a year and four months into its journey (and on my son's birthday), it got picked up by a cacher who said he goes to Colorado Springs, and even Manitou, one of the places I mentioned, fairly often, and he had asked if I wanted him to hang on to it until next time he went.
So, a year and a half later, he finally makes it down to the Springs area. (Meanwhile he had taken it on a lovely tour of Paris with him). He drops it off in a cache.
But not just any cache. This is where the story gets weird.
I check out the cache he places it in, Weasel COS, and it strikes me that the name of the cache and the name of the hider are both familiar to me. This is a unique cache owned, partially, by h2o z, who lives in Klamath Falls, Oregon, the place where my husband and I moved right after our early courtship in the Springs area. This same cacher has a cache called Weasel in Klamath Falls that we found on our visit to that area this summer! (He is also a Charter Member of geocaching.com).
So, I think it is really strange that of all my 62 trackables I own, that the one that symbolizes my husband and I's relationship ends up in a cache on CHEYENNE MOUNTAIN BLVD for pete's sakes (the main drag to the zoo, where I worked when I lived there), in a cache owned by someone who lives in my husband's hometown, a town of 19,000 halfway across the country!
Weird.