Travel Bugs

Goecaching has several twists to it. The basic sport involves the search, find and logging of a geocache. Now mix in registered and tagged items that have as their goal to travel from cache to cache on a journey wherever the owner pleases. That's right. This "twist" depends on the faithfulness and honesty of geocachers to responsibly move these tagged items along their way. Sometimes the goal is to travel to all 50 US states; to travel from one place to a specific cache somewhere, or simply to travel the world indefinitely. Currently there is a race going on between a number of geocachers. They each launched a TB with the goal that they make their rounds and return by a given date. The cache that travels the greatest distance wins. How do you know the distance a TB travels you ask. Each TB has its own page on the www.geocaching.com website. Everytime one of us moves a cache we log in to the TB's page and indicate that we have possession of the TB. When we drop it in another cache we return to the page and indicate where we dropped it. Travel bugs can be just about anything you think of and can put a tag on. The owner of the TB gets an email message everytime it sees activity. Anyone can go to the TB web page and see the log entries and even see a map of its journey. Every geocacher that logs finding and moving the geocache sees his or her TB count go up. Even those who simply note the tracking code and leave the TB where they found it get credit for having "discovered" it. There are some really interesting TBs out there. Now for the sad side of the story. Many TBs live a long life and make their intended journey. Unfortunately many go missing on the trail. Whether found by muggles, the uninitiated to geocaching who stumble upon the cache and find the TBs inside, or by careless or uncaring geocachers who misplace or keep it; the TB disappears. Even with the potential that you will lose your TB, those who launch them add a new and gratifying demension to the sport. In other words, TBs are cool!