The Impending Death of the Travel Bug

This article was originally published on Cache Up NB. It has been mirrored here for archive purposes only.

When I started geocaching more than six years ago, it seemed that travel bugs were a lot more popular than they are today. Oh yes, we still see them popping up from time to time and they still move along from cache to cache, but it would seem that the days of these particular traveling items may be numbered.

Now, I’m not talking about geocoins. Geocoins are going to be around for a very long time as they are a very popular item with geocachers. Whether it be moving them along, buying, trading, or discovering them, it seems geocoins are more popular than ever.

I’m referring to the fact that because most caches being hidden today are micros, the ability for travel bugs (or coins for that matter) to actually travel is becoming more and more of a problem.

In most cases, bugs are found more often at events than caches. In the last year, a whole lot more micro caches have been hidden than regular sized containers. At one time, it was fairly easy to find a container to drop a bug into and it would move along nicely. But with many geocaches now at the micro size, it’s harder and harder to find a decent location for a bug to move to.

Combine that with the fact that by far and large, most trackable items that are released get lost. Of all my items I have in the wild (couple dozen), there are only one or two that I ever see actually moving. The rest have sat in a cache or in the hands of another cacher for a long time. At one time, I used to send messages out asking people to move them along but after awhile I stopped as it seemed no one bothered. Bugs go missing because people either think they are a swag item and keep them for themselves, or the cache is muggled/destroyed with the bug inside and it’s gone forever.

These two facts lead me to believe that the actual travel bug itself is doomed to die off at some point down the road. I don’t see trackable items going anywhere as I suspect this is the largest source of income for Groundspeak. They charge $1.50 per trackable code and people are ALWAYS ordering new coins to be made and new trackables to be released. That’s a pretty endless cycle of income as long as people are interested.

But the bug itself, I think beyond bugs being passed from event to event, it’s dying. It would be nice if this cool part of geocaching lore could find a new life somehow and bring something new to the table that would allow it to survive the changes this hobby is seeing.