Cache Type = Travel Bug House

[+Moose Mob]

Here I sit near Las Vegas. Lot's of people coming through here at all hours of the day and night. There are over 500 caches within a 35 mile radius. At least 4 of them are self described as a Travel Bug Hotels/Depot/Lunch Stop. How can a traveller find a Travel Bug House easily in this town or any other? (Special emphasis on the word "easily".)

 

How do folks feel about a Cache type of "Bug House" or similar method of easy identification.

 

On a personal note, they should be easy to get to (Terrain 2 or less), close to a major/significant highway or airport, easy to find (difficulty 2 or less), not too many of them (not closer than 5-10 miles of another bug house). Perhaps even Members Only as to help keep our geo-coins from becoming momento's for the 5 cache wonders.

 

Just tossing out thoughts....

[+BlueDeuce]

The name - Bug Hotel or Bug House, is usually enough for me. I'm not sure how big of an interest there would be in a new cache icon.

Edited August 30, 2004 by Elf Danach

[+nfa]

Hi,

 

Check out this post I just made in the TB forum.

 

nfa

[+Moose Mob]

The name - Bug Hotel or Bug House, is usually enough for me. I'm not sure how big of an interest there would be in a new cache icon.

Agreed, as long as they are called "bug house" or "bug hotel". And for road trips, it would be nice to be able to easily identify them. And you have another point, we don't want a zillion icons either.

[Jeremy]

I'll be honest and say I'm not a huge fan of travel bug hotels. If one of those ends up getting muggled, a lot of travel bugs go missing at once.

 

That aside, I don't think it warrants its own type. It's a container like any traditional cache.

[+Moose Mob]

Yep, I've seen one particular TB house get muggled twice, and resurrected twice. I wonder how many TB's got lost in that one. TB houses need a lot of extra attention and planning if they are going to function to thier design.

[+Markwell]

I'd like a special cache type for caches that are 623 feet from the parking, and kept in an ammo can under a decaying tree stump, accessed from the west side.

 

Sorry to be so crass - but cache types CAN get too specific.

Edited August 31, 2004 by Markwell

[Jeremy]

I can see why the original request was made though. Perhaps a better way to go around doing it would just be to have a list of airports where you can do nearest caches from. Most TB hotels are near a major airport anyway.

[+The Leprechauns]

Not just airports, but also near the junctions of major highways. Awhile back, in a thread about the "how to find caches along a route" dilemma, there was discussion of possibly mapping the US interstate highway system by exits. Such a project would make it easier to search for caches near one's route, and that would include travel bug hotels.

 

The foregoing should not be construed as an endorsement of travel bug hotels. I don't like them either, and for the additional reason that they sometimes turn into travel bug "prisons" by virtue of strict trading rules imposed by the cache owner.

[tlg]

The foregoing should not be construed as an endorsement of travel bug hotels. I don't like them either, and for the additional reason that they sometimes turn into travel bug "prisons" by virtue of strict trading rules imposed by the cache owner.

I have no qualms when it comes to violating cache-owner imposed rules. The only rules I agree to abide by are the rules (aka guidelines) imposed by geocaching.com.

 

Since most TB hotels have some variant of "TB Hotel" in the name so they should be easy to identify.

 

I added the second paragraph in an attempt to remain on topic.

 

I added the third paragraph to explain why I echoed something already said.

[+Mopar]

Not just airports, but also near the junctions of major highways. Awhile back, in a thread about the "how to find caches along a route" dilemma, there was discussion of possibly mapping the US interstate highway system by exits. Such a project would make it easier to search for caches near one's route, and that would include travel bug hotels.

Sounds like "TB Hotel" could be on of those oft-talked about cache attributes. I agree with Lep though, just knowing there is a regular cache near an exit is good enough for me.

Lep is on to something with the exits. It might be a nice little site project for a group to geocode all the interstate exits. I'm sure Babel has some obscure command line (just teasing, Robert!) that would let it take a PQ and output a GPX of caches within x miles of each point in a list. If it doesn't now, I'm pretty sure it could have it.

I used the current arc filter in babel to create a GPX of all the caches within a mile of my route on a recent trip. That worked pretty well for me. If I happened to notice a cache come up on the GPS, and it looked close to an exit, I went for it.

Still, many were miles from the nearest exit, and not worth the hassle. I guess I could have manually limited it down further to just near the exits, but doing it automagically would be so much nicer.

Anyone wants to put such a project together, I'll gladly help compile the data.

[Jeremy]

I did find a web site where you could purchase the interstate exit waypoints. The initial intent of the data was to provide information about local food joints and gas. I can't seem to find that site anymore.

 

If I can find this data, I could prebuild queries for each exit, and provide that feature for pocket queries.

[+rickrich]

Exit/Service table

 

Go for it.

[Jeremy]

Hey, that's it! Thanks.

[Jeremy]

Sent an email. It went unanswered the last time I submitted a request though. Cross your fingers.

[Keystone]

Hey, that's it! Thanks.

Hello,

 

I am was one of the moderators here in the Groundspeak forums, and I'm writing to encourage you to make use of the Forum's search feature. Did you know that a search on the term "interstate" for posts by user name "Jeremy" would have taken you to these search results?

[+Moose Mob]

Sounds like two issues resolved at one shot...

 

First to clarify my initial quiestion... "How do folks feel about Travel Bug Houses", that one was answered. Glad to hear the input!

 

Second... a different thread concerning PQ's and highway travel. Sounds like that one is on a roll now also!

 

Thanks!

[robertlipe]

If there were a set of waypoints for rest areas/exits, that would be a lovely exercise for the new 'points' suboption of the arc filter in GPSBabel. (I'm boggling at the trig involved, but it wouldn't have to be updated THAT often...Besides, parkrrrr did the trig so I don't have to. :-)

 

Start with a .loc of a a state, build an arc file of all the interchanges, filter it iwth arc,points (that uses the vertices of the arc instead of the lines joining the arc) for a small distance and in the end, you have a list of caches that _may be_ good traveller bait or bug hotels. Of course, once you've dont that, you're that THAT far from the "caches along a route" option if you'd be willing to solve it only for interstates - which I'm guessing is "good enough" for the majority of the requestors.

 

You'd definitely want to break it into smaller hunks than the entire database, but that's a very solvable problem. This would be expensive to compute, but a precomputed list (perhaps updated incrementally by new approvals). You might have relatively static lists of "caches within 1 mile of I-40 in TN" that could then be beaten against the users find list (or, with the duplicate suppression filter in GPSBabel, if it had access to that data) to return unfound caches. Solving it for arbitrary routes is a much harder problem; precomputing it for interstates (and this is there the people that don't live in the stats start throwing things at me...the parlance and possibly process is different, but the idea remains the same in other countries) would help with a lot of the fussing.

 

Anyone with access to appropriate data sets that wants to sketch such things out with GPSBabel is welcome/encouraged to contact me directly. I'm not opposed in principle to providing a "hopped up" GPSBabel to help with this kind of thing.