Some fun with geocaching.

My Twitter friend, @PlagiarismToday, and I share a few interests. One of them is geocaching.

Although I’ve been fooling around with geocaching since about five years ago, I just rediscovered it. He, on the other hand, has been seriously going after geocaches every weekend for a while.

One of the things you can do with geocaches is set up, pick up, and transport “trackables.” A trackable is an item with a tracking number on it. You log it with the Geocaching.com Web site and place it in a cache. From that point on, every time someone picks it up or drops it off in another cache, they should log it. This makes it possible for the item to not only move from one cache to another, but for the item’s owner to track where it is.

I had a travel bug (like a dogtag with tracking information) and attached it to a gumby-like figure that I named Smiling Yellow Devil (SYD). I logged it into the Geocaching.com Web site and gave it a “mission”: travel to New Orleans, where @PlagiarismToday lives. With luck, the folks who find SYD will not only keep moving him from cache to cache, but they’ll move him toward New Orleans. It might take years, but eventually, I hope he gets there.

In the meantime, @PlagiarismToday has created another trackable named Flightless Bird that he’s sending my way, toward Wickenburg, AZ. The idea is that we’ll release them around the same time and see which reaches its destination first.

I’ll likely be blogging the progress of each trackable item as it moves along. To watch along with me, subscribe to the comments on this post; that’s where I’ll put the updates as they come in.

And if you’re a geocaching enthusiast along SYD’s route, I hope you’ll help him get closer to his destination.