It had to happen some time, I went to my first geocaching meetup! There have been a few different suggested ones appearing in my geocaching profile over the past few months, this one happened to be a TB (Trackable or Travel Bug?) Exchange, and what an exchange it was! I had a couple of my own travel bugs just waiting to start their adventures, so I thought this might be a good event to attend. It was a quick meeting (30-45 min) outdoors in a local park, and the weather was beautiful for it!
I found this meetup to be extremely valuable for a newbie like me, as it gave me a larger view into the wide world of trackables. There were so many TB’s that showed up (I’d guess between 50 to 75-ish or more! and around 20 people), and I went home with a lot more than I brought, hopefully that’s a good thing!! The amount of different kinds of travel bugs and the ideas people come up with to create them was astounding, to me anyway. 🙂 It gives me lots of ideas for any future ones I may want to release into the geocaching scene!!
I got to raise the amount of trackables within my geocaching profile as ‘Moved‘ or ‘Discovered‘, and attending a geocaching event counts as a ‘Find‘! So, the idea with the exchange is that if you see a trackable but don’t actually take it, you can log it as ‘Discovered‘, and if you take it, you are supposed to log it as ‘Retrieved‘, and then move it along to another location/geocache.
These images below are a small sampling of the travel bugs at the event, yes I have blocked out the codes otherwise anybody could log them. We only want legit discoveries logged! These are ones I ‘Discovered‘ at the event and yes I went home and spent a TON of time logging them all on the geocaching site, more than 50!
The event had a contest for whomever brought the most original travel bug, and this rooster won, it was huge!! It has the travel bug with code (about the size of a military dog tag) around its neck. You’d need to find an extra-large geocache to place this guy into! I would have loved to take him home, but didn’t want to be responsible for placing him somewhere else! Although I suppose he could be brought to another event, haha:
I brought some travel bugs home with me, now I will find geocaches to move them into. Sounds like a good excuse to do some traveling of my own this summer! I have ‘Retrieved’ them and they are now sitting in my ‘Trackable Inventory.’ When looking these up on geocaching.com, you get more information on them and almost every one of them has a story behind it and a mission it wants to accomplish. Some of the ideas and stories people came up with for these are amazing! I can also see where these trackables have been and how far they have traveled before they came to me. One of these has traveled more than 147,000 km around the world and many others originated from countries in Europe and have traveled thousands of kilometres. Somehow they made their way over here to me! I read all the stories for them and found it so interesting to learn where these things have been and why.
These travel bugs have a variety of missions, some that simply want to travel the world, others that are trying to get from one person to another via geocaches that are near to those people, ones that just want to travel from cache to cache, ones that want to go to a specific destination and then back again so the owner can then add it to their permanent collection, and even one that wants people to post their cat pictures in the log as the TB travels from cache to cache! Some of the descriptions aren’t in English either, so I guess we’ll just keep moving those ones along until they find someone who understands 🙂
This pirate geocoin below is by far the most favourite one I retrieved. It is very good quality too, heavy and larger than a lot of the other travel bugs/geocoins I’ve seen. And super detailed as you can see! As tempting as it is to just keep it, it has a fantastic mission and I vow to help see it through! I found where it can be purchased so I think I’m going to get my own, and then keep that one in my geocaching ‘Collection‘ (another geocaching feature to learn about). Maybe I should start collecting pirate-themed travel bugs and geocoins, as I have seen (and own) a few now and I love them so much, they look amazing to me, yaaaarrrrrrrr!!
These two Canada travel bugs (below) are the ones I brought to the event to exchange. I actually did attach an item to each one, and I’m glad I did being that most of the other trackables at the exchange had something attached to them. I didn’t really know that it was a ‘thing’ to send some sort of trinket with the trackable and have no idea what possessed me to include them with mine. Maybe I read something somewhere. And this is another photo fail moment for me because did I think to take a picture of them with their trinkets attached before people snagged them? Nooooooooo!!!
I can say though that the items I included were keychains I had made out of Perler beads. One was a Pokéball from Pokémon and the other was a little bumblebee, the tiny flying insect kind, not the Transformer!
I wish I had these Canada ones when I traveled to Iceland and Mexico earlier this year, I would have loved to have dropped them in geocaches in those countries! I have two pirate themed ones still (ones I own), but I want to come up with some creative missions for them before I release them into the wild.
Our gracious geocaching TB exchange event host also brought a collection of rocks she had painted, for keepsake and/or distribution!! This reminds me again that I need to get on my own rock painting adventures, gaaaah!! And again, did I think to take a picture of ALL the rocks before people started taking them, noooooo!! Below are the ones I took:
So yeah, this event was super awesome and a great learning experience. Also got to meet and talk to other geocachers in my city, where I attempted to glean any tips and tricks from them that I could! I will for sure be considering future meetups, not sure about another TB exchange any time soon until I send off the ones I retrieved this time ’round, but I suppose it doesn’t hurt to go hang out and socialize for a bit!
