We just can't stop!

Welcome to the Rainbow Bug Motel!

We had some things to get at a bigger store than what Bellaire provided, so we, meaning me, Karyn, Tiffany, Hunter, K'ryn and Kyler, climbed back into Karyn's van (she has a better DVD player and heated seats) and headed to Gaylord. Tiffany and I were looking at the caches in this city, just in case, and found a travel bug (TB) motel! We knew it was very possible to find in the snow because it had been logged as a find the previous day!

One thing though. This cache was not the usual cache. It wasn't created to trade the small items Hunter carries in his soft purple sack, it was for trackable items (bugs and coins) only. Well, it just so happens that Santa had given me three TB's for Christmas, and Karyn, as kcgraham fellow geocacher, had given me one more! While in Wal-Mart I picked up a couple key chains to attach to my new TB's. Hunter chose a small globe that floats around like a compass for this cache.

It wasn't snowing, but it was COLD! The children were smart and said they would stay in the warm van, although their attitude may have changed had the cache been their kind of treasure. Karyn calls her TomTom GPS unit Max. So Max took us past I-75 and out toward K-Mart, the other side of Gaylord we rarely visit. As we came closer to the finish line on Max's screen, we realized that the cache was probably at a business. I had read back on http://www.geocaching.com/ that the location was someone's property, but if we had a GPS in hand, it was a free pass thru.

We didn't see the name of the business until the end. Had we not been staring at Max's screen and been looking up and around, we would have saved some time and our cold fingers! A sign out front said Rainbow Plaques and the cache name was The Rainbow Bug Motel.

We ended up pulling into the business next door and it took us a bit to orient ourselves with our GPS's, finally realizing where we wanted to go was behind the business next door. The cache creator had said if a flag was up, a TB was there, flag down, no TB. As we left the van Kyler changed his mind at the last second and followed us out into the packed snow. We didn't know what the cache owner might be referring to until we saw a mailbox in a place where no mail would ever be delivered, facing the back of a building. There were the abbreviations GC on it with a few numbers. We interpreted the first two as meaning geocache and the numbers after as the numbers the geocache is listed as the database.

Tiffany and I rushed over there. Karyn had taken Kyler back to the van after he had fallen and gotten all snowy. On the flag were the words, Flag up, TB here. Flag down, no TB. I was bummed the flag was down, but I added my first travel bug I called A Small World to the cache.

On my TB's home page I wrote for its mission the following:

I would like my Small World TB to travel the big world. More specifically, go somewhere out of the United States...somewhere warm...with no snow...and easy access to tropical drinks.

Karyn came around the side of the building long enough to sign the log and snap the photograph you saw at the top. Another cache found!