Taking it on the Road

New York State

I'm travelling with my son as he starts his college career at RPI--Rensselaer. We were very productive today, getting the boxes of stuff he left up here with relatives in July, and shopping for the last few things (like a trashcan). After we settled into our hotel, I went looking for a Travel Bug Hotel :)

Larger caches that can hold a lot of stuff are sometimes called a "TB Hotel", where people can drop off their Travel Bugs, or pick up others. A Travel Bug is some kind of smallish item that is tracked through the Geocaching web site. Sometimes the item itself has a tracer number etched on it, and other times there are tags with the number on them that is attached to the item. People drop them in a geocache and wait for someone else to pick it up and move it to another geocache, hopefully moving it closer to its "goal". Some goals are "I want this bug to travel the world", or "This bug likes mountains, please take a photo of it with you at a mountain".

The cache I was looking for reportedly had 7 trackable bugs in it. I looked at the goals for each one, and I thought I could really help with 2 particular ones. The first one wanted to go to "football towns and take its picture with the local team's logo or mascot". Um...hello? Gainesville! Plus as a bonus, I'll be going back through Boston on my way home and I figured I could find some kind of Patriots logo somewhere. The second bug was from a (at the time it started its journey) a 4-yr-old boy in England. He wanted his bug to go to amusement parks around the world. Well, I'm not planning on going to any amusement parks, but I can sure put it a lot closer to Orlando! Someone else can pick it up and take it there--or at least that's the idea. According to the logs, this bug had already been to Disney Paris, and some other parks in Europe.

I found the cache after a moderate amount of searching, but unfortunately, the football bug wasn't in it :( The amusement park one was, as well as an item that hadn't been listed online--a trackable geocoin in the shape of an apple. I grabbed those two things, signed the log, and went back to the hotel. A good day :)

This is "Luke's Wuggle" :)

I'd like to send a trackable out someday. I just haven't yet decided on a goal. I have some nebulous ideas though, so maybe someday soon :)