Just over a week ago, I grabbed my first travelbug. I’ve noticed, at least in my area, that geocoins and travel bugs often go missing and are unreported through the proper channels. Sometimes a geocacher will post in the geocache logs that they found travelbug XYZ, but fail to log it in the trackables section. As a result, I search for a geocache, find one that reports a trackable and eagerly locate it only to find out that someone else took it before I got there and didn’t report it.
I think the trick is to make the travelbug either so incredibly cool that people want to log it, or make it so crazy difficult that it’s a bragging right to log it. So I took the liberty to locate three eccentric travelbugs to share with you (click on the travelbug names to jump to their Geocache profile):
This travel bug is a small mason jar, filled with a portion of my Uncle Elwyn’s remains. He passed away recently and asked that his remains be spread in the wilderness. This seemed a fitting way to do just that. (To ensure there are enough ashes to make it to every state, please use the spoon provided.)
Uncle Elwyn was always an adventurer, proud that he had hiked all 50 states. He loved to hike, camp and fish – plus he was quite the musician. Unfortunately Geocaching came along too late for Uncle Elwyn. He was about 45, well maybe 55, 60. I’m not sure. (Once he mixed me a drink, I was about 5 years old – it was Kool-Aid and pop, I thought that was cold. Cold meaning good, cold’s supposed to be bad … ah nevermind.)
As far as regulations in regards to scattering ashes, here is some information from funeralplan.com: “Most laws surrounding funeral service are based on public health. Once a body has been cremated, there are no public health concerns. Therefore, there are no requirements (or laws) with regards to handling cremated remains.”
But if you decode the dedication, it’ll be revealed to you the real nature of the mysterious powder (and I’m not talking about alien space dust… we’ll get to that travelbug later).
Joe, the quote bug, likes quotes. All kinds kind of quotes…from famous people, celebrities, friends, relatives, yourself, movie quotes, song quotes, etc. They can be funny, profound, weird, whatever. Joe just likes quotes and would like to collect them in the little book he carries around with him.
Joe’s up for traveling anywhere and everywhere to find good quotes. Can you help him?
If you find Joe during your caching adventures, please help put a smile on his face by adding a quote to his quote book. You could even add it to his online log for more people to enjoy!
Also, feel free to include a date, city/state/country, etc. to your quote entry.
Egnix dropped this travelbug with a unique purpose in August 2002. He tells us about the journey that brought it back around to his possession in a forum post: “Over the years I got to read about its travels around the country. I met people and received emails from people saying how much the liked Joe. I even heard Joe inspired a least a couple cachers to send out similar travel bug books. … 8 years, 18,160.2 miles, 16 states, 49+ caches, and 60+ cachers later, Joe’s book is almost completely full of quotes and writings from people all over the country.”
The International Space Station Geocache is literally “out of this world.” It orbits the earth at 17000 MPH at an altitude of 250 miles.
This listing was published with permission from Groundspeak.
I traveled to the ISS on October 12, 2008 becoming the first second generation astronaut. While there I created this geocache aboard the Russian Segment of the ISS. The cache itself is locker #218 as shown in the provided photograph. There is no logbook in this cache, out of respect for the Russian segment of the ISS, and the fact that it would be a fire hazard to include one in this locker. You will find, however, that I attached a Travel Bug to the locker. I am hopeful that any future geocaching astronauts will start my Travel Bug on its way home, and leave one of their own in its place to start a similar journey.
The International Space Station orbits about 250 miles above the earth and travels about 17000 miles per hour, completing an orbit of the earth every 90 minutes.
Today only the American Space Shuttle and Russian Soyuz vehicles can reach the ISS. This will be changing soon, not only is the shuttle retiring soon, but there is a fleet of private space vehicles coming soon, which will allow greater access to space and hopefully ultimately the space station. Thus, while today only about 500 people have made this journey, and I am sure I am not the only geocacher among them… many more will be reaching space soon, and I am hopeful to see many visitors in time.
– Richard Garriott
By the time anyone finds this bug, it will have traveled around the earth a great many times!
Please take this bug to the NASA NEEMO Undersea Lab. Once it has been there, it needs to return home to me in Texas.
In case Richard Garriott needs an introduction, he’s also known as Lord British, the founder of the former game giant Origin Systems, and creator of the Ultima game series that graced so many software shelves from the ’80s to the early 90’s.
This travelbug and the geocache that contains it is obviously of a high profile and has been blogged about a few times:
I’m still trying to find Michael Reed Barratt’s geocaching profile to see if he has anything to say about the cache. Until then, if I happen to bump into him on my tesseract tardis time and space traveling borg cube, I’ll let you know what he has to say.
Over the past year, as my wife was introducing me to Geocaching (she certainly knows what a man likes *grin*), an interesting development with Scouting and Geocaching was taking shape. It had been announced as early as 2009 that the BSA 100 year anniversary and for Geocaching’s 10 year anniversary would be a perfect pairing.
This relationship, dubbed “Get in the Game!,” was not without its glitches. In one discussion BSA was chided for partnering specifically with Groudspeak in the requirements instead of allowing scouts to use TerraCaching.com or Navicache.com. Someone pointed out, however, that Groundspeak’s Geocaching.com has clear and appropriate requirements for hiding, maintaining and finding caches that support the scouting experience.
Another problem was waiting for the actual merit badge to become available. As scouts were earning their badges mid-2010, when the requirements were first released, badges weren’t available for purchase until Mid-December.
I’m reminded of Russell in “Up”, holding out his GPS unit confidently and announcing they won’t ever be lost (before it’s accidentally chucked out the window). That GPSr is the map of the 21st century; it’s important for the youth today to learn both paper maps and compasses (in case something disrupts or weakens the GPS signal enough to make it inoperable/unreliable) along with GPS units, and this concept is perfect. As technology increases and more intelligent GPS units are made to increase their reliability and accuracy, older technology and the patents they were built upon are just now expiring and GPS units of that older technology becomes cost effective. To me, taking my kids out on Geocaching hunts isn’t just about the family bonding and treasure hunting, it’s about teaching my children about survival skills: treks across wilderness and talks about where to get shelter, food and water while we’re being hounded by freezing wind.
Although scouting is long associated with BSA, Girl Scouts have also been involved with Geocaching, and they’ve been active at it just as long as the boys. That makes sense as families have both boys and girls and it’s family volunteers that make up the backbone of both organizations.
Something that I discovered along the rabbit trails, that most geocachers would want to learn is that the Cascade Pacific Council of BSA has released a series of scouting caches, usually near boy scout camp grounds or state parks since geocaching often becomes part of the camping-out experience. That’s not all. Other Scout masters and enthusiasts have placed geocaches out there for our enjoyment, such as #1scout, roostersting, TKDScouter, paulie777 (aka “Steeves Memorial Scouts”), and Eagle Ranger just to name a few. Although not as popular, Girl Scouts have also put out a number of caches and have a merit badge for the sport, though it can also involve letterboxing.
If you happen to find a scout-themed geocache, consider this: 181 NASA astronauts were involved in Scouting, and over 30 percent of our armed forces were involved with Scouting. Give a little of yourself to these caches for the leaders of tomorrow. They’ll be looking out for you in the future, even if today they’re only looking out for geocaches.
Groundspeak is shooting itself in the foot, and with the new opencaching.com website, sponsored by Garmin, it’s time they stop being selfish and open up their API … and they better do it quickly.
There is a private API and it is available for trusted partners. We have no plans to offer an open public API at this time. It was considered in the past but the current decison is to keep it private.
Sounds short-sighted, if you ask me – especially considering that this comment was made August 2008, nearly two and a half years ago and they still haven’t opened their API.
Why does this interest me? Support tools by fans would be an enormous benefit to Groudspeak. I would like to develop an app or even a web-page that helped geocachers manage and automate their virtual caches. Imagine, as a geocache owner, that you are able to provide a form for people to simply fill out. Once done, it allows the geocacher to log that they found the virtual. (Better yet, it even automates their log post if they have the right answers!)
Imagine, then, the service growing from that idea, allowing earth caches and history caches along with the virtual caches … all automated.
Currently, Groundspeak not only doesn’t provide an API, but their site license prohibits the use of spiders, robots, scraping, etc. That’s understandable, but they should create an API. Google’s done it and see how they’ve grown. Flickr’s done it, too… they’re going strong despite the competition. It appears that any strong data-driven company has an open API. People want to automate process, they want to enhance the experience.
If an API was made available, and a company/developer like atebits, TapBots, or any number of the excellent developers out there decided to make a Geocaching app, doubtless it would be brilliant. For starters, you can dump the ugly custom UI, improve the speed of it, and, as you said, improve the reputability of it over 3G/EDGE/etc, and bam, you might have an app that’s actually worth £5.99.
Fact is, the app as it is now is just terrible. It rarely seems to work when I’m out and about and want to find nearby caches, and often simply visiting the website using Safari and finding caches that way is faster.
At such a critical time when new geocachers are nudged into other offerings, it’s the combination of a variety of good tools and access to data that will win the race. Opencaching.com already has a public API out and ready for anyone who wants to develop a kick-a$$ iPhone app for them (and I would be one of the first ones to buy it)… Is geocaching.com up to the challenge?
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