Dakota Golden Travel Bug

We’ve been enjoying some beautiful spring weather here in South Dakota,
which means it’s time to start geocaching again! : )

For those of you who are not familiar with the term, “geocaching” is a real-world treasure hunt using GPS devices that's happening right now, all over the world. Participants navigate to a specific set of GPS coordinates and then attempt to find the geocache container hidden at that location. According to Geocaching.com, there are currently 2,584,841 active geocaches and over 6 million geocachers worldwide!

A “Trackable” is a sort of geocaching "game piece." You will sometimes find them in geocaches. Each Trackable is etched with a unique code that can be used to log its movements on Geocaching.com as it travels in the real world. Some of these items have traveled hundreds of thousands of miles thanks to geocachers who move them from cache to cache.

Our family has enjoyed geocaching since May of 2011. We’ve found 131 caches in 5 different states. In June of 2011, we placed 2 trackables in geocaches here in Sioux Falls. One of them disappeared, never to be seen or heard about again.

The second one was a picture of a golden retriever similar to our dog, Molly,
pictured below. We called it “Dakota Golden”. Since June of 2011, this travel bug has traveled 23,641 miles all over the world! 

Dakota Golden Travelbug Timeline:

June 2011 – Placed in a geocache in Sioux Falls, SD

July 2011 – Traveled to Tennessee, Alabama, & Idaho

October 2011 – Colorado

December 2011 – Connecticut & Michigan

While in Michigan, our travelbug visited an interesting cache on the grounds of a Detroit prison, and the above tag was added to it.

February 2012 – Grenada, St. Lucia, US Virgin Islands

March 2012 – New York

June 2012 – Quebec & Ontario, Canada 

October 2012 – Germany

10/14/2012
Pictured in the Town Square in Vreden, Germany

November 2012 – Netherlands

June 2013 – Island of Crete, Greece

July 2013 – Czech Republic

 

9/22/2013 - Panoramic view near geocache in Czech Republic

 

10/26/2013 – With Geodog Peggy in the Czech Republic

 

6/26/2014
With Yrbi, a 10-year-old golden retriever in the Czech Republic.
His owner commented that he would have been good friends with Molly. : )

~

Our travelbug was placed in many caches in the Czech Republic, but didn’t leave that country for almost 2 years. Just last week it was taken to the island of Cyprus!
We are excited to see where it will go next! : )