[Little episode today]

Since there seems to be some insistence that the OP was unnecessarily endangering the children I would like to point out that cars go out of control all the time -- even to crashing through a restaurant window like happened in my area just a couple days ago. If you think you are 100% safe any place on this planet you're wrong. Maybe you feel safe sitting in your living room but cars have been known to come crashing into houses as well. Forget about home invasions, there's also things like earthquakes, tornadoes, and sinkholes swallowing up houses. Life is dangerous and nobody gets out of it alive. That doesn't excuse doing dangerous things but proper precautions can mitigate dangers but you will never ever eliminate them. People walk along streets all the time on a sidewalk in the city and some of them get hit by cars and killed -- I used to have a nephew that we lost that way. Someone on the side of 4 lane highway often is much farther away from traffic than the person on the sidewalk. Do what you think is prudent and let others do what they think is prudent.

 

As for the encounter, there's people around who get excited about stuff for no particular reason and often aren't interesting in actually hearing the answers they are demanding of you. Offering to call 911 often does defuse situations like this but I can see it escalating the situation as well. It's hard to know what to do in that situation especially when you have kids around you and you have to be concerned about their safety as well. All I know to offer is morons are like God -- they're everywhere.

[Solution to Stolen Travel Bugs]

I just started this hobby. While there are a lot of caches in this rural one horse town area, the vast majority of them are micros with log only. There was one that was large enough to contain items but is apparently often muggled with used condoms left in one case. Fortunately when I found it was empty but I did use latex gloves to handle it. Yesterday I found my first cache big enough to contain several items and a TB. It came from a state park 35 miles or so west to this cache on some private land. The first had last been logged as found a month ago with no mention of removing the TB. The cache I found it in had not been logged as found for several months. So failure to log is an issue as well as ignorance if most of what you find is log only caches. I hope I'm not careless enough to fail to drop this next month -- I'm going to an area that gets it over half way to it's goal. I may get stupid and forget. I hope not.

 

How do change it? You can't. People don't run on my priorities or yours. They operate on their own priorities and often very loosely at that. You won't change that.

 

There are an amazing number of things that I spend money on that I don't ever get a return on but it's part of the things I get enjoyment from. One of those things is to go fishing with lures that generally start about $5 apiece. Amazing how many don't make it back home with me from that first fishing trip. Truthfully, more than a few of them didn't make it back to shore after the first cast. But if you're not losing lures to snags, you're not catching fish. I suspect that if you're not losing TBs, you're not doing much tracking. I intend to lose a few trackables of my own. That's known as the cost of doing business. YMMV