Travel Bugs

Geocaching has sort of taken over our lives right now.... we are having so much fun with it... I love that my parents and my sister and my kids are all involved... We are meeting some good people who geocache and having so much fun. I love that it takes us out into the woods to explore and that with lots of the caches come history lessons that help us to learn about the areas around us and brings up questions and discussions with the kids. I am amazed at how many new and cool places we are finding because of geocaching. This week we wanted a short hike and some quick caches so we headed out for on one the island here... found a 400 acre preserve full of hiking trails and caches. We had known the preserve was there.. just had not thought there would be hiking trails that were open to the public. They would be great for mountain biking on too... hmm can you guess what we are thinking of getting :)

So on to the travel bug part of this post.... travel bugs are things with tags that have track able numbers on them...that people put in caches... the first one we came across was the Joe Funk one...and it was a coin that had started in California and wanted to go to New Mexico in time for a child's first birthday... well it did not make it.. in fact if you go read the logs for it.. somehow it ended up traveling to Canada and hanging out with someone for like 7 months before heading back this way... we found it... moved it south and then someone picked it up that happened to be going to New Mexico... so it is a lot closer.. and only a couple of years late :(

We then picked up a travel bug (in the form of a huge key with a tag) named "The key to every mystery" that is from Belgium and wants to travel the world and have it's photo taken in cool places.. so we have been spending a few weeks taking it everywhere with us... and will put it in a new home this weekend. There will then be a blog post for it :) It is fun to see all the places it has been and we will keep a watch on it so we can see where else it goes. At the same time we picked up a geo coin... which is ( as far as I can tell) sort of the same thing... this one was the skunk'd coin.. that wants to travel around to different parks and pretty places and have its picture taken.. so it has been on a journey with the key. We just left it in cache in the beautiful preserve here on the island and took a different geo coin.. this one is a Fallen Hero Coin in honor of Staff Sgt. Todd E. Nunes.. it wants to travel from cache to cache to honor all those that have fallen.

This post is to share some of the photos of the Skunk'd coin that we have now left in the other cache and to share where it has been. We found it in a cache hidden on Mountain Loop Highway, which was visit often for hiking and caching. It was in a cache called "oh Shoot! I forgot my camera at home" Well we did remember out camera... but it was a very wet overcast day so the view was not what it can be.

We then took it to Sequim on a geocaching/hiking adventure with us.

We stayed at our favorite bed and breakfast where you sleep in your own private caboose.
We also went to the John Wayne Marina and watched the boats coming and going.. found a couple of fun caches there.

Great Hiking in Sequim on the Olympic Discovery Trail and lots of train stuff... saw a couple of really awesome train trestles turned hiking trails.

It needed to visit our beach ( Camano Island ) while it was here.. so we took it down for super low tide and it had it's photo taken here :)
Next we headed up Mountain Loop Highway ... if you follow my blog you will see many posts about this place... as we tend to visit there often... rivers and lakes and woods and trails and mines and caves and views and camping... you can not go wrong.. it is a beautiful place full of interesting caches. This last weekend we headed for a trail to Bear Lake.. Pretty easy hike.. about 3 miles total... and a beautiful mountain lake is the reward :)
Now the coin is hiding in a cache off a trail in here. We look forward to watching it's travels from here on out :)

~ Michelle