“Back to our Roots”
Posted By Larry on January 19, 2009
One of the attractions of geocaching for us is the opportunity to pick-up and move along travel bugs and geo-coins. For those not familiar with these items, a Travel Bug (TB) is a trackable tag (with a number etched into it), similar in size to a dog tag, that you attach to an item. The item can be anything small enough to fit into a plastic container or metal ammo can. The tag allows you to track the movement of your item online at Geocaching.com. The item becomes a hitchhiker that is carried from cache to cache by geocachers like us. Geo-coins are special coins created by individuals or groups of geocachers as a kind of signature item or calling card. Like travel bugs, each geocoin is assigned a unique tracking ID which allows them to travel from geocache to geocache.
When you decide to create a trackable of your own, you have to name it, and then decide on its mission. Our first trackable was a travel bug called “Back to Our Roots”. Its mission was to travel from Massachusetts to Honolulu, HI, birthplace of one half of Sox06, then back to Worcester, MA, birthplace of the other half of Sox06. We encouraged the taking of pictures along the way to post & share the journey with others. We placed “Roots” in the Cranberry Pond Cache (GCGF6F) on March 4, 2007. After spending some time in Massachusetts caches “Roots” moved to the state of Washington on June 12th of 2007 and then on to Idaho in October of 2007. “Roots” made the big leap to Hawaii on November 11, 2007 where it spent the next few months. In January of 2008, “Roots” began the long journey home by hitchhiking from Hawaii to Texas. After spending the next 6 months in many Texas caches, “Roots” took a slight diversion and headed to the far northwest state of Oregon. “Phantom Tech”, while geocaching in Oregon, read the mission statement and stated in his log entry that he would help “Roots” on the journey back home. He moved “Roots” to Connecticut in August of 2008. As far as we know “Roots” is still in Connecticut in a cache named “What!!! Another Dam Cache???”. Soooo close to completing the mission!! We have thought about going to Connecticut to retrieve “Roots” but decided it really needs to get back to Massachusetts on its own. The mission wouldn’t be complete if we moved it to Massachusetts ourselves. (Of course if you are an ambitious geocacher and are reading this blog and really want to do a good geo-deed, perhaps you could move our TB along?!?!?) Anyway, part of the fun of geocaching is following the travels and adventures of travel bugs and geo-coins and reading the stories that they pick up along the way. It’s just another reason we geocache. We have other TB’s “out there” and will mention them in some future blogs. Maybe another trackable for us in the future will be to attach a Travel bug to an item that calls attention to this site. Hmmm!
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Thanks for sharing the adventure of Roots… I have released quite a few coins and bugs with mileage missions… Let’s just see how much mileage we can rack up. I have a Penguin coin that I just acquired that I think I am going to put on a mission to make a stop in Antarctica and then back to me. Not many caches down there so I suspect it is going to be a pretty ambitious undertaking.
Again, thanks for sharing.
[...] presents Back to our Roots posted at Geocaching with sox06, saying, “Great article about the journey of a Travel Bug. [...]