mortaine

No, the common mistake would be to skim the Goal and miss the two-letter "VA." In reading "About this Item:" I see "This mission is the first in my overall goal of having my TB make round trips from my current home to every town in which I have lived. This first in the series is naturally to the place of my birth thru my mid-twenties." But no mention of where the place of your birth actually is. Seriously-- Repetition is your friend. I realize that rancor, sarcasm, and snide remarks are your defense against our criticisms that your method of playing the game isn't in line with the way the rest of the world plays it, but do consider the fact that you have a number of people here telling you that your expectations that everyone will have the TB sheet and an Internet connection available at a geocache are too high, and that if you're going to be this anal about your TB's movements (cripes, it didn't even move 28 miles west, just perpendicular), then perhaps you won't enjoy your travel bug's journey quite as much as you'd hoped. You might want to quit while you're only a little bit behind.

Yeah. I take it back-- I wouldn't pick up your bug, even if it were sitting in a rest stop cache. Who wants to deal with a bug owner like you? Very high maintenance and really cranky, it seems to me. My suggestion: drive out to it, pick it up, put it in your pocket, and go home. Mail it to someone in Portsmouth and have them mail it back to you. It's the only way to be sure.

My Kirei TB has a very simple mission, which is not much different from "go from cache to cache." It's "go to various alternative/renewable-fuel-related caches." But yeah-- mission cards, or at least SOMETHING that says where you're going, are a must.

I remember my first "standard light pole" cache. We walked around for almost an hour trying to figure that one out.

"Now, had I found the cache in the hiding spot and wasn't able to sign the log for one reason or another but could describe it to the owner, I would expect him to allow me a smiley on the cache page." Maybe. Unless half of the challenge was getting to the box, as with the cache that was 20 feet up, for instance.

Oh, man. I assume this little kid is known to him, right? I think some serious talking-to is needed.... to the parents! Every time I stole something when I was a kid, I got caught, and reprimanded, and had to go back to the place I stole from and apologize and return the item, and was shamed. Which is probably why I only stole twice.

I love the hot pink laminated tag, though. That's terrific-- a guarantee it won't get overlooked in a cache! And a dream job TB.... what a clever idea! I love it when people write creative log entries!

And you think that people will read *that* instruction?

If you had taken the bug or just wrote down its number, you can log it as a TB find directly, without going to the cache it was supposed to be in. It then gets put into your inventory, even though you didn't visit the cache it was supposedly in. Then you can add a note to the cache it's in that says "Found it here" and drop it from your inventory, so it shows up in the correct place. GC.com wouldn't log a find for you in the other cache, just a note from the travel bug pickup, and you'd be helping the bug become unlost (right now, it's lost-- if someone goes to the cache it's supposed to be in, they won't find it, and won't know which cache it's in.)

I have a laminated mission tag on my Kirei travel bug, which I think works pretty well. I wrote on the outside of the book for the Joke Book bug. And on the Bill of Rights bug, I just used the normal metal dogtag and wrote the bug's destination on a piece of masking tape and attached it to the dogtag. That way, the travel bug is almost entirely metal, very durable, and the masking tape can easily be removed and replaced when it gets to its destination.

Sorry, but your expectations are too high. You expect people to read the mission tag? You should know by now, if solely from driving or taking public transportation, that nobody actually reads instructions or signs anymore. The bug is gonna move the wrong way sometimes. Sometimes a LOT in the wrong way. That's just the way it is. I had a Missouri-bound bug get grabbed in Texas and moved to Michigan before finally being placed in Tennessee. It's since been grabbed, taken to Florida, with a promise to drop it in Iowa in a couple of weeks. Iowa is closer to its destination than Texas, Michigan, Florida, or Tennessee. In the span of just over a month, this bug, which has logged almost 6,000 miles so far, will finally get within shooting distance of home. On the other hand, as you pointed out, it's only 28 miles away. That's still within reach if you really want to go out, grab it, and place it in whatever cache you like. There's no rule saying an owner can't pick up a travel bug to move it or re-place it. You're free to do so, if it really bothers you that the person moving it moved it in the wrong direction. Or you can just wait. This is a 3-day weekend. I'm sure a lot of geocachers are getting out and about this weekend, especially if the weather stays clear. Your bug will probably move soon. If not for the fact that we're taking 580 and it's out of our way, I'd offer to take it into the Sierra Nevadas this weekend. Edit to add: Portsmouth.... where? What state? The website doesn't say. If I didn't have the bug in my hand, I wouldn't know where you plan to send it. Is it written on the Mission card? Just some thoughts for if you want to make it more likely to get to its final destination. Edit2: Ahh... I see the Goal says "Portsmouth, VA." Still, I think perhaps in the longer description you could include what state you want it to go to, and if it's not printed on the Mission card, you should definitely put it there.

CITO is incredibly helpful as camouflage. For night-time cache-hunting, I go with the "I lost it" thing. We were caching one evening during the "half hour after sunset" that the park is still open. People kept walking past me (I should know better-- nobody is there at dawn when the park opens, lazybones!) so eventually I got out my flashlight and every time someone walked by, I would whine loudly to my husband "I guess I've just lost it, then-- are you suuuure you didn't see it?" Worked like a charm. Everybody wants to help someone find whatever they've lost. But if you're *whining* about it, suddenly everyone has headphones on or needs to be somewhere else, fast!

Also re: TB hotels near airports. Since airports are CONSTANTLY under construction, you need to check up on your hotel periodically and make sure there isn't a planned human hotel about to go up. You don't want the TBs to end up buried underneath Yet Another Hilton.

Also, one way to get more people who understand about "leaving" is to make your caches premium-only, limiting them to premium subscribers of GC.com. This would mean that the people who can even see your listing are people who are already contributing to the site/game in some tangible way, and who are more likely to "get it."

OK, here's the thing (I know, this is 6 months later... so what).... If I'm geocaching, and I leave something cool like an arrowhead, I might want it to be traded for something valuable. If you took it and left 25 cents in exchange and your log consisted of "took arrowhead, left 25 cents, signed log" then yeah, I think you're sneezy. If you took it and left 25 cents in exchange and you signed the web log with "So, here's the story...." and went on for three paragraphs about your experience that day, about your niece and what she's like and what she means to you, and how she smiled when you gave her the arrowhead... well, I would say that you traded up, because you took something and, while the physical item you left behind was not much, the log you left was an experience shared. Which is more valuable? I can tell you what I, and most other geocachers will value more.

Thanks for posting a picture of the insides of those. I'm thinking of placing a really evil cache (a rock... inside a cave) and was concerned that the rock hide-a-keys were just a little too small for trade items. These look just big enough for small trade items.

I go into the waypoint on my GPS and change the Geocache icon to Geocache Found. I also carry a small Rite in the Rain notebook in which I write down my finds, the date, and the cache coordinates. I don't know why I write the coordinates down; I just copy them from the cache page. When I'm dead, maybe my nephew will find it interesting, I guess. More likely, I'll lose the notebook someday and someone will find it in the woods somewhere and post it to the Internet as a found object.... I don't typically write down what I traded, though. Lately, I've been taking nothing much anyway. I have a PDA, but to be honest, I never want to rely on it in the field. Since it doesn't have a replaceable battery, it's only as good as its most recent charge. I lost the card reader for my digital camera (I suspect the kitten stole it), but I could take a picture with my camera phone, I guess. I just don't usually bother.

Ditto for me, too. Except that you use the GPSr as the cell phone in a cover up situation, silly! No one around here would be caught dead with a cell phone as large as my eTrex anymore. Plus, the cell is handy for taking pics of me near the cache site for posting logs. Now if I would only remember to actually do that....

Maybe I should have put it in bold.... I WAS ONLY HALF-SERIOUS ANYWAY. Sheesh. You'd think I had suggested sending munitions as an entry!

Jeep TBs get a special icon and are more likely to be picked up (though also more likely to get stolen). I was only half-serious anyway.

I like to mention when an area needs some CITO care. I remember the "Don't Mess with Texas" ad campaign-- perhaps reminding your fellow Texan geocachers of that message would be helpful....

Can we attach a TB tag to a yellow jeep TB and enter it?

Well, my favorite of the ones I own is Austin's Joke Book. This is a really ordinary yellow Rite in the Rain notebook that I released almost 2 years ago in California. Its goal is to reach my nephew Austin in Missouri, collecting kid-appropriate jokes on the way. In the time since this travel bug began its journeys, Austin has gone through a lot, including his parents divorce and remarriages, new stepsiblings, and he started school and learned to read! That last bit is very important, because it means he'll be able to read the bug when it gets to him. My mother, who I introduced to geocaching in 2003 and who lives near my nephew, has been eagerly watching this bug as well; she gets excited every time it gets 50 feet closer to her house. According to the latest log, it has 6 blank pages left and is going to Florida before heading back towards Iowa. What's special about this bug is that it's travelled so far to get to my nephew, and in the process has spread a lot of humor on the way. As of its last pickup, it had travelled 5,860 miles. Also, Austin does not know that this travel bug exists. He knows about geocaching-- it's something that his grandma and aunt do. But I wanted the travel bug to be a surprise, in part because I didn't want to get his hopes up in case anything happened to it on the way. Judging by a recent picture posted to the log page, it also looks like the joke book has picked up a hitchhiker tag. Which is totally cool. Mom and I are excited about its imminent arrival, and look forward to helping Austin put together a Show and Tell presentation after it arrives.

My first travel bug (that I own) requires people to think of a joke and write it in the bug. If anyone ever deletes a user's account for taking more than a week to come up with an appropriate joke to add to my TB, I will personally hunt them down and beat them with a GPS lanyard! I think this suggestion is idiotic and designed either as a troll, or to try and kill the travel bug game entirely. If you don't like it when people hang onto your travel bugs, then don't release them! PS: my most recent travel bug that I own is a copy of the Bill of Rights. I encourage people to spend as much time as they like, reading over it and thinking of creative ways to exercise the rights listed thereon.

Well, last year, taking travel bugs was definitely a bad idea-- I logged 4 caches all year long! Some of us know we don't go out often enough to place a bug into a cache in a reasonable amount of time. In fact, yesterday I placed a bug in a cache, and the bug had only been in my possession for about a week-- it's a record for me! Some of us just know we're too irresponsible to get the bug moving quickly.....