Blast From The Past: Geoacaching Travel Bug Comes Home

Here is a little blast from the past!

On June 5, 2012 I started a global travel bug race. I sent out 8 alien drone travel bugs to 4 countries on 3 continents, and the race was to see which bug would get back to my hometown of Lenoir NC first.

Now, since then I had burnt out on geocaching.  Really I burned out on everything (Depression will do that to you), and geocaching was an innocent bystander.  I had forgotten about this race, until a week or so ago when I got notified that the bug was in a cache near Lenoir.

Today I went to retrieve it.  Here it is:

This bug, drone #5,  was the first to get released, in the south-eastern part of England.  Since then it has travelled around the UK, hopped the pond to Oregon, then made its way to Texas, Ohio, Tennesee, and finally North Carolina.  It has travelled almost 8500 miles, and been in the hands of 115 people.  Here is a map:

Now its back, and will live out its life in my big box of treasures.  A rather nice way to mark Labour Day weekend.

Cache on!

Take Me To Your Leader: Race Winner!

On June 5, 2012 I started a global travel bug race. I sent out 8 alien drone travel bugs to 4 countries on 3 continents, and the race was to see which bug would get back to my hometown of Lenoir NC first.

 Today, amazingly, the first drone bug arrived in Lenoir.  We have a winner!  Drone #8 was the first to complete its mission. Woohoo!

This bug had the farthest to go - literally around the world.  I had started this bug off on its journey down under in Canberra Australia, where an awesome cacher by the name dvixen sent him on his way. From there he travelled 10,840 miles on his journey back home.

From Canberra he hopped over to Los Angeles, then a quick jaunt across North America to Connecticut.  He then travelled around Maryland and Virginia, then jumped to South Carolina.  In South Carolina he was picked up by a cacher by the name of grassfinger, who dropped him off at a TB hotel near my house in Lenoir.

Of the original 8 drones to be released to the world, 4 have gone missing, and one arrived safe and sound.  This means there are 3 drones still out there that may still make it back home.  However I am absolutely stoked that even one made it back.

You can get the status on all of the bugs from the tracking page.

Several pictures of this bug were taken on the final journey for Drone #8, like the one on the right.  The rest can be seen on the drones status page here.

When I got notification that the travel bug was placed in the local cache, I immediately headed out the door with my wife to retrieve it (luckily my parents were in town to watch the kid :)  A few minutes later and I had the bug in hand, a winner declared, and a huge smile on my face.

Many thanks for dvixen for releasing this bug, and for grassfinger for going the extra last mile to him to the finish line.  This has been an awesome caching experience, and a great deal of fun, and really, isn't that the point?

Now you may be asking what the plans for this little drone are.  After travelling across the galaxy, and around the world, he is going to go into quiet retirement, spending the rest of his days at a TB retirement complex, sipping on Floovian Blue Juice, and listening to "just a little more Lynyrd Skynyrd".

This will likely be his last public photo before becoming a recluse:

The Alien Invasion Continues

Some more alien travel bugs have landed and are racing back home. So far 7 alien travel bugs have arrived (still waiting on the Australian one, but hey, it is on the other side of the world...), and most have been placed in caches already.

(Update: Just got word that the Australian drone just arrived, so all 8 are accounted for)

 The following are some more pictures taken by the awesome cachers who have helped with this project.

 Note: If you are new to this whole alien travel bug race thing, you can learn about, and keep track of, the travel bug race here.

The first picture was taken by idajo2 with Drone #1.  It is taken at her bird feeder in Washington.

This guy is drone #3, released by darrylw4 (host of cacheamaniacs.com), and taken at his post office box when the travel bug arrived in Michigan.

Drone #4 was dropped off at Breakwater Lighthouse in Maine.  Astute readers may remember brdad as being the creator of the most excellent travel bug, In Casus Ursus.

Drone #5 was the first alien to make it overseas.  Released by Luminesence, it is pictured here at the first cache the alien visited, a nano.  He is currently on a small tour of Britain before being placed in a cache to start his portion of the race.

Aliens Have Landed In Denmark

As regular readers of my blog will know, on July 5th, 2012 I mailed out 8 geocaching travel bugs around the world to start an epic race to see which one will be returned to my town first (if you don't remember, you can catch up here.  Go ahead... we'll wait for you...)

Many of these travel bugs have already arrived at their destinations, and several of the cachers have taken pics and wrote awesome log entries for the TBs. This project is turning out to be way more fun than I ever expected it to be, and it is due to the awesome spirit of the cachers that have been helping me release these bugs.

You can keep up with the race on this status page.

 Zilveruno, a cacher in Denmark, received one of these bugs a few days ago.  Before he sent it on its way by placing it into a local cache, he took it to work.  He is a train driver, so the travel bug (Drone #6), got quite the awesome sight seeing adventure - not bad for his first time out of his space ship.

 

Take Me To Your Leader: The Race Begins

Today I have started a travel bug race... and perhaps an intergalactic conspiracy... all without having to leave the comfort of my air conditioned basement.

If you are not familiar with the concept, a travel bug (TB) is an object that has a unique tracking code.  The bugs are moved from geocache to geocache by cachers, and their movements can be tracked various websites, in this case geocaching.com.  Some bugs have missions attached to them, normally to get to a specific location. Others are released to travel the world at the discretion of the cachers that find them.

These bugs have a very specific mission: to return to me by being placed in a cache near my town as quickly as possible.  The exact mission reads as follows:

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to move this travel bug on the shortest route possible to get to Lenoir North Carolina.

Just a short time ago, in a Galaxy close to home, on a small moon orbiting a small red planet in the Alpha Centauri star system,  monitoring stations began to pick up radio signals from a small blue planet in the western spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy. Specifically the signals were from Golden Oldies 102.4FM out of Whichita Kansas.  After listening for several years, a group of 8 aliens had heard enough and decided to take action. They loaded a small Orion class star ship with as many cans of Floovian Blue Juice (their most favourite drink - and also used to tune their radios) that would fit in the cargo hold, and blasted off their home moon in search of this little blue planet, and the radio station therein.  Their mission:  to get the station to play "just a little more Lynyrd Skynyrd" because they play " a little too much Menudo".

When they bumped into the Horse Head Nebula, a heat tile was knocked off the ship.  Just as they entered the atmosphere, disaster struck.  The cargo bay doors burst open in the heat.  The entire supply of Floovian Blue Juice was blown out of the ship and burned up in the atmosphere.   The aliens took to the escape pods, and were soon scattered across the planet.  The ship crashed near Lenoir, a small town in western North Carolina.

Stranded on a foreign planet, and the only bottle of Floovian Blue Juice being an emergency supply squirreled away in the captains quarters on the crashed ship, each alien is now locked in a race to the juice.  The first one back will get to get enjoy the last bottle of Floovian Blue Juice, and tune into "a little more Lynyrd Skynyrd" on 102.4FM out of Kansas City. The rest will be cursed to drinking water, and trying to recall the memory of "a little too much Menudo".

Speed, as you can imagine, is of the utmost importance.

The race works like this: I have mailed via the United States Postal Service, 8 identical travel bugs to cachers in 5 countries on 3 continents.  They have agreed to release the travel bugs in a cache near them.  Each travel bug is a 1" glow in the dark alien attached to a TB dog tag that contains the tracking code.

Due to the asynchronous nature of the release (i.e. the TBs will not be released on the same day), the "winner" will be determined by the shortest number of days between the time the TB is logged into its first cache, and the time it gets logged into a cache in Lenoir.

None of the TBs have been placed in caches yet - they are still in the mail at the time of this writing, but  expect that to happen over the course of the next two weeks. The progress of the race can be tracked here: http://debaere.blogspot.com/p/take-me-to-your-leader.html. 

Thanks to idajo2, boysnbarrie, darrylw4, brdad, Luminesence, dvixen, zilveruno, and Tha Duh Feez for helping place these TBs in their respective areas.

It should (hopefully) prove interesting to see how these travel bugs move from cache to cache as they work their way back to me. Stay tuned for updates.