Puzzling Travel Bug Activity

[Ootek]

In tracking travel bugs we’ve found, we’ve noticed that some are being placed in one or more cache(s) and retrieved the same day from those caches by the same person. What’s the reason?

[Linus4Cache]

People generally want their bugs to move around to as many caches as possible, and the idea is to put miles on them as well. As such, sometimes a holder will log a bug in and out so the owners know where the bugs are travelling, and so that the bugs log the miles for their journeys. Then when they leave them in a cache…well, you know.

Depending on what I find when I read a bug’s page, I either carry it with me to all the caches, logging as I go…or I leave it in the bus and only log when I drop it.

I own a bug that travels with me to all the caches I visit. I drop it into the caches, then pick it up with a note. The bug gets the miles and the cache log, but it doesn’t add to my personal bug total. If I am caching with a group of people who haven’t held the bug yet I give them a chance to grab it for a cache or two before I pick it back up and log for the day.

It’s done by different people for different reasons, but these are just some that come to mind.

[Cheesehead Dave]

On a couple occasions, I have retrieved bugs that I know that I’m going to hand off to someone or place in a specific cache to help it meet it’s goals. Sometimes I’ll know that it might be a few weeks or a month before that handoff is going to take place, so I have a little fun with the bug in the meantime and bring it cache hunting.

For example, check out the Cache Viking. This was a missing bug that belonged to someone I know that suddenly reappeared in a cache in Illinois near where I work. I rescued it and planned to pass it on to another cacher iin Illinois who was going to move it on its way. Scroll down to August and see the Bugs adventures, which included a trip to the 2004 WGA picnic.

A different type of example is the Caching Karma Stick. This is tracked as a TB, but is never actually stored in a cache, but is passed from cacher to cacher. I did a five-stage cache series in a group of five. Someone brought the hiking stick and we each took a turn carrying it from cache to cache. When we got home, we coordinated logging the TB by grabbing it from the cache we received the stick at, then dropping it in the cache we passed it to the next cacher at.

I’m sure different people have other reasons as well. Some people have “personal travel bugs” that they wear on a chain when the cache and drop and grab for each cache they find in order to use GC.com to help track the number of miles they have traveled going from cache to cache.

And of course, there’s also the infamous event bugs where everyone writes down the bug’s tag number and grabs the bug from the event cache and drops it back in again.

There’s no real “official” guidelines for what you can do with a travel bug tag, so I really don’t get all that concerned with what other people do with them, just so long as my bugs keep moving…

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