Disney World or Bust!

We have chosen a month for our trip to Disney World. We're going in June, 2011.

In preparation for our trip, we decided to do something fun. Lately, I (Marc) have been geocaching. If you're unfamiliar, you take a GPS reciever (I use my iPhone 4) and you head out to find a set of coordinates where someone has hidden a cache, which basically is a small container that sometimes is only large enough to handle a tiny piece of paper on which you sign your name, and other times it's large enough to hold small objects like keychains and coins. It's a treasure hunt. It's geeky. It's fun. It gets you off your butt and it takes you places you may never have gone otherwise.

One piece of geocaching involves objects that can be tracked called Travel Bugs. A travel bug can be moved around randomly from cache to cache by geocachers, or it can have a stated purpose. Today we started our own family travel bug. It's a Mickey Mouse head with two dog tags. One tag has its identifying number (like a license plate), the other gives some directions. Our travel bug has a mission. Starting today, it has begun its journey to Florida. It is currently waiting in Glenview for someone to pick it up and move it along to another cache. It will work its way to Florida and when it arrives it will live in caches near Disney World until we get there in June to reclaim it! So, the second dog tag on it says, "I need to stay in a cache near Disney World, thnx."

>We will watch it move around the country from the comfort of our home computer. We don't know how fast it will get there. We don't even know if it will beat us there! But we're hoping. We know it's about to take a long trip from Chicago to Maryland because the geocache where we placed our Mickey today has a "departure gate" in it. Apparently, someone who visits this container goes regularly to Maryland, and as a result, any travel bug that is put in his cache gets a one way ticket to Maryland.

I just took a travel bug out of this geocache today. This travel bug I took has a goal of visiting all 50 states. So far it's been to Maryland, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Washington, Oregon, West Virginia, Minnesota, and Illinois. It originates from Minnesota. I'm working on getting it from Illinois to a cache in Hawaii. Kathy has a friend who lives there and I'm hoping she can help us out...

Now, doesn't this sound like fun? If you want to learn how to do this, go see Geocaching.com. If you have questions, comment here or send me an email.