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Had the closest near-meeting back in January when I missed Dreamcacher by maybe 5 minutes at this one . Scroll down to the log for January 29th.

Now I like the idea of weather resistant travel bugs.

Hmmm - did I just see a 110 pound anvil on sale in the latest Harbor Freight catalog? - hehehehehe. Extremely heavy anvil - $89.95 on sale Travel bug tag - about $5 hidden wildlife camera trip wired to geocache $49.95 Look on someone's face when they find the travel bug - priceless --- Then there's this seized up 307 cu in Oldsmobile long block that a TB tag could be stuck under a valve cover bolt or somewhere else on the engine

I like that sized tag, especially since I have access to a luggage tag laminating machine. Did you copy/paste the goal of the TB from the web page, or from the sheet, or other? I prefer to print things for geocaches with a laserjet and use a rather expensive grade of paper that is much more resistant to moisture damage. Inkjet printed anything just runs even with light dew condensation, and many cheap papers tend to come apart. After printing it out and trimming it to size, a coat of acrylic plastic varnish on both sides tends to be about as good as lamination as long as it's not exposed to direct sunlight. I agree about the importance of attaching something about the goal to a TB. It's like the address headers on an ARRL radiogram. When someone receives formal radio traffic, the ham who receives it during a traffic net then has the responsibility to pass the traffic along. If he's in Midland, TX and the recipient is in Odessa, TX, he's not normally going to next pass the radiogram to someone in San Francisco, or someone in Miami, or in Newfoundland. He's probably not going to pass it on a "long-haul" HF net, but pass it on a local VHF/UHF net or by packet. While moving travel bugs is nowhere near as structured as moving amateur radio traffic, if the message has no instructions, it's difficult to "handle" it properly. But, imagine Joe Geocacher being a long-haul trucker who came from San Diego, just went thru El Paso, and now has stopped in Midland for his DOT mandated time. He gets up and still has a couple of hours before they will let him get on the road, so he does a geocache or two nearby. He encounters a travel bug. No clue whether it is eastbound, westbound, or wants to leave the country or what. So he leaves it there. But with a "travel itenerary" - he suddenly knows that it's also eastbound and can pick it up, or that it's westbound or some other direction he's not going this trip, and leaves it for someone going that direction. Or someone from Lubbock finds the TB, sees it's headed for Cleveland, and he's going to Dayton on business on Thursday. No sheet, he leaves it behind cause as far as he knows it might be going to Mexico City. A sheet, he picks it up, it ends up in his checked luggage, and then he does a good cache outside Dayton the next day, and it's now about 1200 miles closer.

I took the 4 TB's that have been riding around with me for far too long out to an oil well I've been doing some work related stuff at and took some pictures. The pumpjack is so HUGE (about 30 feet tall and 60 feet long, with a stroke length of about 12 feet) and even the biggest TB's so small by comparison that setting them on the safety cage and backing up far enough to get it all in the picture, the smaller TB's were maybe a couple of pixels. So next was to carry all of them about 50 yards back and set them on the 480 volt disconnect panel, but it looks like the only way to get both in focus is to Photoshop it. That's how this picture was made - two separate frames of the same scene - one focused on the tarantula only 2 feet in front of the lens, the other focused on the pagoda in the background. Then, I found a spot in the midrange about equally out of focus in both pictures and stitched upper half of one and lower of the other together at that "seam" where the joining line would be much less conspicuous. That log was at P is for Pagoda

Indeed. Two years and wasted the whole experience. The flip side of that is another military dependent I went to college with a quarter century ago (scary it's been that long), who spent a whole summer in Germany - sufficiently immersed it took a while to re-acquire English. The rest of us learned an awful lot from him about his experiences over there, bits of local culture that you just can't get out of any book. Plus he needed a foreign language elective that semester, and so it was an easy A in German to pull up the GPA. Speaking of college - I need some excuse to spend a whole day in Lubbock, TX - several geocaches await both in town and along the way up there and back by different routes. Might add up to nearly 400 miles of driving by a circuituous route to hit "new" (to me) caches along the way and get some travel bugs moved along. I emailed them the URL for this thread. I noticed several geocaches about 5 miles from the middle of the base in all directions - good excuse to get both of them out there doing something - hopefully geocaching and not just doing Dale Ernhardt Jr impersonations on the autobahn - LOL. A buddy of mine is very fluent in Spanish because he's travelled extensively in his younger days all through Central and South America, plus was in Spain for 6 weeks about 2 years ago.

That is one nice thing about caches in the desert / semi-desert areas - I've found several that weren't sealed properly by the previous finder weeks before and the contents were still dry. But all we need is a good gully washer and several cool, humid mornings for such a container to aspirate a lot of water.

Yeah - depending on where it gets placed - might just paint it light grey to match caliche rocks and use it as an artificial rock. The shape is kinda similar.

Quite a few. I wonder how many were placed by US service personnel and how many by natives? It wouldn't surprise me if there's some unlisted ones because they are inside restricted areas (like on bases).

Oh, wow. I bet adding seeds to some burlap wrapping around the container in a damp climate would grow well, with the burlap providing a good place for the roots to take hold. There's various ground cover plants that one could plant around the cache container in early spring that would grow around, rather than on, it and totally hide it within about 14 to 30 days into the growing season. The best "self-hiding" camouflaged cache I've discovered so far in West Texas is in a pack rat's nest. When you find it, and replace it, the rat immediately goes back to work covering it back up with thorny sticks, prickly pear pads, stray highway reflectors, and of course pieces of blue WalMart bags that migrate hundreds of miles from their source with every dust storm. If you glue the sticks and stuff surrounding the container together except for those on top of it, and then glue those separately like a "lid", the cache is really tough to find but easy to re-hide because the sticks and stuff don't collapse when the cache is pulled out.

Thanks. I passed her the link. Sounds like there's some interesting ones over there. Guess I need to create a travel bug to turn loose here and see if it gets somewhere near there before they end up stationed somewhere else. Their last assignment was South Korea. She says they are waiting for the day they get new orders to ship out to Iraq or Afghanistan. Wonder how many geocaches are in Kuwait, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia by now?

Of course with a lot of patience and the right temperature darkness and tending the crop, one could grow mushrooms from the -um- substance :-) Working on a cache container camouflage that once it's painted and placed, ought to live up to its name "something or other geocache Number Two". While the livestock in the area don't leave deposits the size of what the dinosaur did in "Jurassic Park 3" where they were digging for the satellite phone (and found a human femur and other stuff in the process), a 5 pounder can conceal something bigger than a 35mm film canister.

Friend of mine is currently overseas at Spangdahlem Air Base in Germany, and is suddenly interested in hunting some of the geocaches nearby. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that geocaching.com actually pulled up caches in Germany by punching in the coordinates. Anyway, the dilemna is translating some of the more interesting looking ones around N 49° 58.350 E 006° 41.550 (which seems to be somewhere on the base itself according to Google). Has anyone figured out a fairly painless way to feed cache listings and logs through Babelfish or something similar for translation? That might also be great to log finds in both languages. It looks like geocaching.de holds some promise for mapping, but it would require some translation to navigate through it. How have others dealt with a language barrier like that? If nothing else, just answering their question about geocaching in Germany gives me a new appreciation of what foreign tourists, immigrants, etc. go through trying to communicate such basic things as where the toilet is, or whether they want mayonaise or mustard, tomato or onions or fries with that.

If most of that region still didn't still practically glow in the dark (which it did when hastily abandoned following the events of April 25, 1986) This region would be great for hundreds of very creepy hiding places. Special equipment needed would be a cumulative radiation dose meter and a Geiger counter, plus decontamination. If nothing else some of the photographs on that page and the descriptions of them are creepy.

At a recent event cache we were trading some "war stories" about the most digusting things ever encountered at / near a cache. Someone found such a "dump that stunk" - complete with used wiping paper. When life hands you lemons, sometimes you just have to make lemonade.. Had everyone cracking up - "First to Muggle - Took nothing - signed nothing - left log".

If I had it and wasn't likely to use it, I'd leave it for someone - with enough time before expiration that it could be used. I left an HEB gift card last year, and someone has been leaving Hastings' shopping cards in some regional caches (about $5 or so). WalMart shopping cards are sometimes found - one with lat/long and gas station hours to the 3 nearest supercenters. Then there's the $5 winner lottery tickets...

I just suddenly noticed that in addition to the geocache found photos in the gallery, the assorted travel bug photos also suddenly appeared this weekend. Nice. Now to figure how to save server space by re-using the duplicates (like one photo with several TB's in it, both in the geocache log and individual TB logs).

Having found just about every cache nearby, I've gone back to many to either pick up or drop off a travel bug. Like someone else said, new caches tend to get a flurry of finds in the first week or two until all the local cachers have had a weekend free to go find them, and then the traffic drops off. However, with time one can figure out which caches are good "crossroads" type caches, and which ones are good for TB's going in a specific direction. What I did over a year ago was to routinely add any TB's in any cache I've previously found (or new ones) to my watch list even if I never did handle them, and then just watch how fast they are picked up and how far they go. This let me slowly build a statistical "big picture" of which caches were good ones to place a TB in, and which ones were more likely to end up MIA or muggled. I've now identified 4 caches that long-haul travelers tend to visit. Of course past performance is no guarantee of future results. Your mileage may vary. Joe Jet was one that was misplaced for 4 months when the transmission went out, but when I finally had time to do some more geocaching and put it in a good cache (that I've been to about 4 times) it quickly was picked up hopped all the way from West Texas to New Jersey in a short time. This one of mine made it to Oklahoma but that was from an event cache.

What I have done so far has been a kind of compromise - pick caches that are at opposite ends of the daily commute, which can add up to an awful lot of mileage in a week. Throw in a cache or two on the way to an oil well or a repeater site, and several hundred miles in a week is really easy to do, as long as it gets logged back in/out of a cache near the office in between. Haven't yet tried to see if it can be logged in/out of a virtual like Black Gold and More - or this one but these can be awesome photo opportunities, especially for a TB that originated thousands of miles away. Click for full resolution

Holy Guacamole! Now that's a big travel bug. I'd probably pick it up and move it, since it can be hidden *near* a smaller geocache in many locations. The look on the muggles' faces to see someone lugging that thing out of the woods WOULD be priceless. Gee now youall have given me a truly *evil* TB idea to go along with the large easy to find geocache that takes a grabbing tool and some patience to retrieve.

Thanks. That's what I was thinking - the owner of either the cache or TB had to set the status, but wanted to be sure. Might save someone a long drive for one that's gone.

Several of us in the area have responded in different ways. I spotted a log on one of my caches this past week where they found it and wanted to drop off a TB but it wouldn't fit, yet there's a smaller TB in the cache. I think he was just passing through from a ways out of the region. So who knows if the TB will get any mileage in the log for hundreds of miles of travel. Some of us go ahead and drop off and then immediately retrieve TB's at these "milli-caches" (too big to be a micro, but way smaller than an ammo can) so the TB receives mileage, since they were physically there in the backpack anyway. Some say that's a no-no - but in the field it's "not that convenient to email the TB owner and wait for a response" - LOL. Some TB goals explicitly say "it wants to travel - feel free to log it in and out of many caches in a day of geocaching". Those are fairly easy to figure out what to do. It's the other s that I wonder if a TB owner will be elated or unhappy. When confronted with this dilemna, what does everyone else do? How many just hang on to it for weeks or months until they find a big enough cache, and how many go ahead and log them in/out by default until they find one big enough to leave it in? I mention weeks/months because most geocachers have real lives and real jobs, and at $1.82 a gallon, geocaching trips sometimes have to be planned around business or on a holiday weekend heading to a new area full of un-found caches. If these mostly turn out to be film canisters stuck in a tree hollow, or small Rubbermaid containers, then the big TB has to stay in the backpack. The other scenario is you finally find a gallon sun-tea sized container or a .50 ammo can that the TB would fit in, but the only way to do it is "Took 82 small items, Left TB, signed log". There is one advantage to the bigger TB's though - you can photograph them in front of interesting scenes to document their travels with a lot less depth of field with the camera - set em 10 or 15 feet away so they're in better focus with the background.

I went to a nearby cache to drop off a TB and pick up one already there since a buddy of mine is going several hundred miles in the direction of its goal today on business, and discovered the cache had indeed been muggled. While I did write a note for the cache (logged the find over a year ago), is there a clean way to account for the TB(s) in the missing cache? Since the TB in the missing cache was one I moved once before - and it kind of did a 45 mile boomerang trip - I've probably got the serial # in my notebook - but - what seems to be the consensus to notify those watching the TB that it and the cache seems to be MIA? Is there any rule of thumb for how long to wait to see if it re-surfaces? Also there is a TB still logged into another area cache that has been MIA for about 18 months. Wasn't there when I found the cache (my 2nd or 3rd ever) and there's been several subsequent finders who also mentioned it missing when they logged the find. Any ideas on that? Does the owner have to move it to an unknown location to fix either of these?

The bug sheet link just re-appeared this evening. The specific one I was trying to print a sheet for was found bagged, with barely legible instructions scrawled in Sharpie on the bag and looked a bit travel worn. Was going to put him in a nearby convenient geocache on the way in to town this evening and discovered that cache has been muggled - again.

Ahhh. At least there's some confirmation that indeed the link was removed. I'll see about posting a note in the web site forum and see if there's a timetable for when some equivalent will be on-line again.