TB HOTELS

[+Harry Dolphin]

2 hours ago, cerberus1 said:

The couple of times that  anyone had "please send it to me" on their trackable's page, we put it in a cache nearby, with an email which one,  or handed it to someone heading that way to do the same. 

It's not my trackable.     If it ends up missing in the mail, I'd  be the one berated.   I'm not coughing up the cash for intl. insurance n stuff...

 

Once, I found a TB that had been marked missing, and the owner put out a duplicate.  The missing one reappeared.  Since the other one was in Europe, the TBO asked me to mail the one I had back to him.  I did, and he sent me a check to cover the postage.

[+HunterandSamuel]

21 hours ago, barefootjeff said:

 

International postage from Australia is frightfully expensive now, especially to Europe. Even sea mail of a small item is well over $20 and anything over 500g cops an extra surcharge for security screening.

 

 

Off topic. I heard on our local news here in the United States that Australia wildfires are now under control?  I'm hoping this is so and please know Australia has been in my husband's and my thoughts. So terrible what has happened and how it began. 

[+barefootjeff]

3 hours ago, HunterandSamuel said:

 

 

Off topic. I heard on our local news here in the United States that Australia wildfires are now under control?  I'm hoping this is so and please know Australia has been in my husband's and my thoughts. So terrible what has happened and how it began. 

 

There are still lots of fires burning but, along the east coast at least, it looks like no properties are currently under threat. A broad area of rain is forecast to move slowly across the eastern half of the continent over the next few days, and although it won't be anywhere near enough to extinguish the fires, it should help with containment. Most of the fires were started by lightning strikes in remote inaccessible areas so the most that can be done is to try to prevent them spreading into populated regions.

 

 

The local national parks and reserves are now open again so I've re-enabled most of my caches. We were fortunate that the Three Mile fire that was threatening this region didn't cross Mangrove Creek and all the coastal forests around here were spared. I have two caches that were close to the fire ground along the Great North Walk between Kulnura and Yarramalong and it's not clear online whether that track is still closed so I'm about to head up there to take a look. The only other cache I still have disabled is GC6JMDK which I removed for safe-keeping in early December when its hiding place looked likely to burn. I plan to take it back out after the rain has dampened everything down, but it's a pretty tough T4 so it will have to wait for a mild day.

[+HunterandSamuel]

14 hours ago, barefootjeff said:

 

There are still lots of fires burning but, along the east coast at least, it looks like no properties are currently under threat. A broad area of rain is forecast to move slowly across the eastern half of the continent over the next few days, and although it won't be anywhere near enough to extinguish the fires, it should help with containment. Most of the fires were started by lightning strikes in remote inaccessible areas so the most that can be done is to try to prevent them spreading into populated regions.

 

 

The local national parks and reserves are now open again so I've re-enabled most of my caches. We were fortunate that the Three Mile fire that was threatening this region didn't cross Mangrove Creek and all the coastal forests around here were spared. I have two caches that were close to the fire ground along the Great North Walk between Kulnura and Yarramalong and it's not clear online whether that track is still closed so I'm about to head up there to take a look. The only other cache I still have disabled is GC6JMDK which I removed for safe-keeping in early December when its hiding place looked likely to burn. I plan to take it back out after the rain has dampened everything down, but it's a pretty tough T4 so it will have to wait for a mild day.

 

Thanks for this update. So happy to hear that properties are not currently under threat. On the news here they said the fires were due to climate change. But then it was reported that several people have been arrested for deliberating  setting the fires.

[+barefootjeff]

6 hours ago, HunterandSamuel said:

 

Thanks for this update. So happy to hear that properties are not currently under threat. On the news here they said the fires were due to climate change. But then it was reported that several people have been arrested for deliberating  setting the fires.

 

Almost all the major fires were started by lightning or, in a couple of cases, trees falling onto power lines. There have been some smaller grass fires deliberately lit and some arrests made, but those weren't the mega-blazes that have done so much damage. Climate change didn't start the fires, but it's contributed to the conditions that allowed them to turn from a single burning tree into the massive fire fronts hundreds of kilometres in circumference.

[+cerberus1]

2 hours ago, barefootjeff said:

There have been some smaller grass fires deliberately lit and some arrests made, but those weren't the mega-blazes that have done so much damage. Climate change didn't start the fires, but it's contributed to the conditions that allowed them to turn from a single burning tree into the massive fire fronts hundreds of kilometres in circumference.

Since we can't seem to stay on-topic in most threads anymore...

Here, the major news stations are saying over 180 arrests made.   That's not true ?   Thanks.      

[+colleda]

2 hours ago, cerberus1 said:

Since we can't seem to stay on-topic in most threads anymore...

Here, the major news stations are saying over 180 arrests made.   That's not true ?   Thanks.      

Of that number only about 20 were for deliberately lighting fires. The rest were for related offences, such as breaching fire bans, looting, trespass etc.

Fake news for political gain exposed again.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jan/08/police-contradict-claims-spread-online-exaggerating-arsons-role-in-australian-bushfires

I'll say no more.

 

[Keystone]

So, how about those TB Hotels?

 

Discussions of Travel Bug HOTELS are on topic for the Geocaching Topics forum and for this thread, since TB Hotels are geocaches.  Ideas for Travel Bugs, complaints about Travel Bugs going missing, etc., are on topic for the Travel Bug forum.  Discussions of the wildfires in Australia are, at a minimum, on topic for the Australia and Off Topic forums - and maybe even the Geocaching Topics forum - but not in this thread.