As I write this post, the familiar RDF (rain,drizzle, fog) continues for the third day in a row. It is a blunt reminder that our beautiful summer has come to an end. And with the end of summer comes the end of vacations for most of us. The peak season for hotel bookings has come and gone. Some hotels and motels even close after the summer. One type of hotel, however, never closes and is available 24/7. The hotel I am referring to is a travel bug hotel.

I realize that, most likely, everyone who reads this blog knows what a travel bug hotel is. Just in case I am wrong in my assumption, however, I will digress to explain it to you. A travel bug hotel is like a central place or repository for dropping off any kind of trackables. It provides a convenient place for someone, who is looking for a trackable to move, to drop by and pick up one. For Geocaching.com’s premium members, all we have to do is do a pocket query for caches that contain trackables and simply go to them. Travel bug hotels, however, remain a better option for finding, picking up, and dropping off trackables. Simply put a watch on a travel bug hotel cache, and you will receive an email every time there is activity on that cache. It’s that easy! Or is it?

While travel bug hotels are a nice concept, I find that there is a huge downside to them. On the best of days, trackables go missing. New cachers pick them up and either forget to log them as taken or don’t know that they have to log them. Other times, cachers ignore any kind of code of ethics and simply take them. They are never heard from again. For more reading on missing trackables, read our previous blog post called Putting the "Un" in Trackables . Travel bug hotels have the potential to cause large numbers of trackables to go missing due to the fact that they usually contain large numbers of trackables. I recently had to report five trackables in my own travel bug lounge as missing. I am trying to track who could possibly have them but the task is really difficult. I have often considered archiving my travel bug lounge. Somehow, we have to better educate cachers on the importance of logging trackables.

Despite their status as travel bug repositories, a travel bug hotel is still just a cache and cachers still visit them looking for that find and, perhaps, an elusive bug or coin. There are several travel bug hotels and lounges on the island. We have our own travel bug departure lounge located near St. John’s airport. It is called YYT-TB St. John’s Travel Bug Departure Lounge (GC) . The purpose of the lounge is to enable cachers to drop off trackables that they wish to leave the island on a flight. It is also a spot to drop trackables that arrive on a flight. Here are a couple more travel bug hotels located around the province.

In principle, travel bug hotels are great places for moving trackables. If cachers were more educated or played by the rules, they would be great in practice as well. For now, I will leave my TB lounge as is and hope that no more trackables go missing from it. Time will tell, however, if it will survive in its present role.

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