I've blogged previously about Da Bears of C-16-07. For Christmas in 2007, I released travel bug coins for each of us and started a competition to see whose "slug" (the name of the coin) could travel the farthest by the deadline for completing tickets - March 9, 2009. It has been great watching them travel - Germany, Australia, Iraq were three of the top destinations. (There is an individual code on each slug which is logged in by the geocacher moving the slug on geocaching.com.)
As the competition neared the finish, most of the bugs were overseas, some having been held long-term by other geocachers. I really had no expectations of any of them coming home by the deadline. It really doesn't often happen with trackable geocaching items.
After my babies went home yesterday, I decided to make a quick e-mail check before I left work. I am glad that I did -- first I noticed a log that one of Da Bears had visited one of my local caches. Hmm...that's nice. Fitz finally got over to Tall Pines. Then I noticed other logs from Fitz. Opened one up. He had grabbed MY slug...Mama Bear. How could this be? Last I knew it was in Germany. I'd even posted a note asking for help reuniting me with it when I went to Germany next month. To make a long story short, Fitz made personal contact with who knows how many cachers and managed to have three of the seven sent back to him. He had Mama Bear with him at the Chili Cookoff on Saturday (it turns out they arrived just after I left.) And yep, there were "discovered" logs from other cachers that thought it was great that it was there and I didn't even know it!
Yesterday, he dropped Mama Bear AND Sonia (who had been in Washington state after being brought back from Australia) into my cache Walking Through the Tall Pines. I had dropped all the slugs into that cache in Dec. 07 as it was my closest cache to Vickie's house, where we had the party that year. So in essence, it was their home cache. Having them return, especially the way that they returned, means a great deal to me. I'm still not sure how Fitz pulled it off but I am so thankful that he did.
When I saw the logs, needless to say I headed straight for that cache and retrieved Mama Bear. I also took Sonia so I could reunite slug with owner, with no risk that someone else would take it first.
To add to the story -- he apparently received Vickie's slug in yesterday's mail and dropped it in several area caches today. And Tod made up for lost time -- he had been hanging onto his own slug but apparently had taken it on many business trips for which he had never gotten around to logging the visits.
So out of seven travel slugs - four made it home by the deadline. Incredible.
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