Thursday, December 30, 2010

The Jayne train travel bugs

No, this does not mean we have a bug in our britches about doing some traveling, although we have lots of places we wish we could travel to.  The only thing stopping us are little things like, my job, bills, time, and money.  You know, little things.  The travel bugs I am talking about have to do with one of my many hobbies.  Geocaching.  Travel bugs are also called trackables.  They are little dog tag type things with a unique tracking number on them that you can log into and out of geocaches.  You put them into and log them into a geocache somewhere, then, most of the time, another geocacher will take them from that geocache and put them into another geocache somewhere else.  Then you can watch them trough the geocaching website and see where they travel.  Since there are over 1,000,000 geocaches worldwide, there is no limit to where or how far they can go.  For the last 3 years, one of the stocking stuffers we have done for the whole family is a set of travel bugs.  One for each member of the family.  We have a theme for each year and we give travel bugs names and a goal as to where they want to go and what they want to do.  
2008 was the first year and we had a family of lizards.  One lizard for each member of the family.
The lizard family travel bugs before being sent out.
  There was DaDa, MaMa, Ems, RyRy, and Sizy lizard.  They were all released into geocaches in December 2008 or January 2009.  They had a goal of traveling to as many geocaches as they could and to see who could travel the most miles.  Today, only MaMa Lizard is still moving around caches.  The others have all gone missing.  As of today, MaMa has traveled 13108 miles since being release. She has traveled all over Northwest Oregon to Washington state, then to Alaska.  From there she went to Japan and traveled to Nova Scotia.  At this time, she has been picked up by a cacher in Ontario, Canada and should be moving a long ways again soon.
The two bands of Knights ready for their travels.
For our 2009 family travel bugs, we made "The Knights of the Jayne Table".  This set consisted of a Knight for each member of the family.  The girls got to pick the Knight they wanted out of a package of them from a craft store.  Their mission was to see which team, red or blue, could get the most miles logged by Christmas this year.  The Blue team has won, even when 1 went missing.  Of the 6 that went out.  5 of them are still floating around in some cache somewhere.  The Blue Knight #3 traveled the furthest of all and was hopping around Europe for some time, then went to Turkey, to Alaska and is now on the way to Indiana according to the cacher that picked it up.
For this years travel bug theme, we decided to go with our new family nickname. "The Jayne Train" as Brooke started referring to our family.  So we have 6 train car travel bugs to release into the caching world this year.
The Jayne Train

The Jayne Train #1

The Jayne Train #2

The Jayne Train #3

The Jayne Train #4

The Jayne Train #5

The Jayne Train #6

Their goal will be to travel around the world and get to caches near trains.  They are in a race to see who can get the most miles by December 31, 2011.  We will see how long they last this time. 

1 comment:

Unknown said...

What a cool idea... Love the themes. Happy New Year!