Travel Bugs at Events

What a great night we had at the Brummie Meet held at The Old Joint Stock in Birmingham. Mumbo Jumbo had the foresight to reserve the upstairs area just for us. We had cachers from as far afield as Northampton, Ashby de-la-zouch and Nuneaton as well as those more local. Twenty two teams signed the logbook, equating to 28 bodies. The instigators, Purple Heather and Slappersire were present are have agreed to run the next one, which should be sometime in the first week of November.

Also in November, somewhere around the 28th, I'll be running another event at The Griffin, Shustoke, to celebrate my 50th birthday.

I've received an e-mail asking "Hi, Can you tell me what happens to the TBs that are left now that the event is over?"

Speaking of our event last night (but applies to most events) you will find that...

a) Some trackables (mainly The Allotment Gardener's in our case) are "dropped off" at the event (usually well before the event) but are kept by the owner. This allows cachers to view others collections and log them as "discovered".

b) General circulation trackables go into a collective "pot" where other cachers are free to select and move on any TBs or coins that take their fancies. Usually, the event organisers are left with a pile of TBs that they are obliged to move on themselves. Fortunately, there was only 1 geocoin left over last night and I'll soon move that to another cache.

A more general point about trackable items. How many times have you come across a TB or coin, picked it up, taken it home and looking it up on geocaching.com found that you've taken it in completely the wrong direction? With my trackables, I try to attach a small laminated tag with the item's mission so that hopefully it will only be picked up by someone who can help with that mission. Geocoins usually come in a plastic sleeve making it easy to add the mission statement. Another useful thing to put on the tag would be the tracking number - some of those coin numbers are very hard to read!

I'm hoping to be out and about on the canal either Friday evening or Saturday morning, walking the loop and maintaining any caches that need it. Lock 4 has been archived and I'm STILL waiting for it's replacement (Waterlinks) to be published.