Just after Thanksgiving in New York, I flew to Tucson for the Conservation Science in Practice conference of The Nature Conservancy. I hadn't been to Arizona or a similar geography in five years. I'd forgotten the other-worldliness of the plants and the unique beauty of arid climes. We were staying and meeting at a resort on the edge of the city near the mountains. Each day I walked the trails around the resort, sometimes in the chilly mornings and sometimes in the last rays of sunset.
On the last afternoon, I walked about a mile east of the resort to an arroyo. I was on a mission. When Paul and I were in Hawaii, we had searched for several geocaches. At South Point, near the Green Sand Beach (see October Hawaii blog), we took a travel bug from a cache. After we got home to Alaska, I went on-line to log our finds and found out that the travel bug had a goal to go south. We had just taken it from the farthest point south in the US to almost the farthest north (short a 1000 miles or so). But our GPS clearly told us that Anchorage was 3000 miles north of South Point.
The guy who had sent the travel bug on its way from Europe was disappointed, to say the least. I emailed him with the promise to find a cache in New York over Thanksgiving or in Arizona. I was surprised at the number of caches in my hometown of Groton, NY, but we didn't get a chance to visit there. I wish I had looked for caches along the Erie Canal because we had several pleasant walks along it. Tucson is full of geocachers, however, and I found several near the resort. Google Earth showed that it would be a pleasant walk from the resort and I wouldn't be rummaging under rocks in someone's back yard. I had to walk along a four-lane artery to get to the arroyo, but once I stepped beyond the first row of verde trees, I was alone. I found the cache beneath of pile of dry sticks under a verde tree. I logged the find and placed the travel bug in its new temporary home and then continued up the dry creek bed until backyard fences blocked my way. Back at the resort, I got online and logged the drop-off and asked whoever found the travel bug to carry it south.
Peter from Germany emailed me a few days later to thank me and to say that his travel bug was residing among many more swimming pools than it ever saw in Europe.
For more on geocaching and travel bugs, check out http://www.geocaching.com/. It can be a unique way to visit some corners of the world.
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