Missing Trackables-Part 03, Release Locations

[+shellbadger]

The chief purpose of this post is to serve as a counterpoint to the next several posts. That is, where my trackables were released, which is detailed here, as opposed to where the trackables went missing, discussed later.

 

My missing trackables were released in eight countries, as shown in the Release Locations table below. I personally left the few trackables in Canada, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Switzerland. All of the ones in Belgium and the United Kingdom (UK) grew from message exchanges with cachers in those nations.

 

The first European releases were initiated by a Belgian cacher who was a fan of Buddy Holly. That person had inquired about some memorabilia from Buddy’s hometown, Lubbock, Texas. I supplied some keychain pendants and patches from the museum, along with a few of my own Buddy Holly-themed travel bugs. Later, I sent him a larger number of trackables to be released at a mega in his hometown of Bruges. Two other Belgians have also asked for, and released, trackables in their home country.

 

The releases in the United Kingdom (UK) grew out as a simple back and forth with cacher in England. In 2015, he and I started regularly exchanging trackables in Stargate fashion, also including in the packages a few trackables of our own making. I still send travel bugs to him, but after I began to understand the comparatively high rate of trackable attrition in this country, and Texas in particular, I declined to take more. I just don’t want to be the agent for somebody’s disappointment.

 

By far the greatest number of releases (96%) of my missing trackables was in the United States (US). A total of 93% were released in Texas and 86% were released into my own caches. The map of Texas below (created with Google Maps) shows the distribution of releases in the state. The red pointers indicate the locations of my own caches in northwestern Texas. Historically, they have totaled over 100, but only about 60 of them have ever been active at any one time. They are all small-to-regular sized containers, and mostly at roadsides in rural locations. The blue pointers are locations of my releases elsewhere in the state. I frequently revisit caches that have successfully launched my trackables in the past.

 

The few other release locations in the US and Canada are shown in the US and southern Canada map below. I only hunt for caches when I am traveling for other purposes, and then only for containers that can take a trackable or two. This accounts for the meager cache finds (432 at this writing) for someone who has been caching for more than 13 years.

 

The release locations in Europe (no map) are only ten in number, because of the way I started keeping records. I treat exchanges and handoffs as drops, and in these cases, I ask the recipients to visit the bug to their nearest cache, to obtain a location. 

 

The next post in this series will summarize the distribution of the last-logged locations of my missing trackables.