GPS geocaching has added a new dimension to Flat Fred. If you have an elementary school aged child in your house, you’re probably familiar with Flat Fred. Flat Fred is a popular school program where children mail a cardboard person on a journey. Aunt Sue and cousin Sam cart Flat Fred off to the local sights, take a few snapshots and write about his adventures in a logbook, then mail him to another friend or relative. Eventually Flat Fred returns home and the children get to see and read about all the amazing places he has visited on his journeys.

Bellevue High School students have put a modern techno spin on Flat Fred by turning him into a geocache travel bug. Travel bugs are special “dog tags” printed with a unique PIN that is registered on an internet site. Often travel bugs are attached to an object like a small figurine or toy. When a geocacher finds a travel bug, he logs onto the designated website and enters the PIN to access an online log. There he posts the position where he found the bug, adds a comment, and receives instructions on where to take the bug next. Some travel bugs have missions to travel to a specific location. For others, the goal is to see how far and to how many different places the bug can travel. 

“Most travel bugs have a goal, like, ‘I want to get to the Indianapolis Speedway,’ so it will eventually work its way over to Indiana, get its photo taken at the racetrack, and work its way back home,” explained Seth Leary, founder of the Washington State Geocaching Association, who helped guide the Bellevue project. “The process can take something like two years, but if they get back home, the owner can keep it on his desk, knowing all the places it went to.” The fun, said Leary, is in seeing where the bugs end up.

In connection with a community sculpture project, Bellevue High School students created small papier mache sculptures, registered them as travel bugs and sent them on journeys in the nearby Seattle, Washington area. One travel bug directed finders to take it to the Seattle Space Needle. Another, dubbed Larry the Loch Ness Monster, asked finders to photograph it at local lakes. A sealife sculpture was photographed with fish at the Seattle Aquarium before finding its way home.

If you want to start your own travel bug on a trip, you can register your bug on geocaching.com. For a great selection of geocaching GPS devices, visit ActionGPS.