The kids' 4-H club is participating in a national 4-H activity, the CYFERnet Travel Bug Race.

The race was designed to encourage kids to learn more about technology through 4-H. Since my family has done some geocaching, we were put in charge of getting the supplies together to launch the club's travel bug.

The 4-H Walker

If you don't understand what a Travel Bug is, here's the low-down.

Yesterday several members of the club hiked to our geocache at Kiwanis Beach to launch it. A few in the club had never geocached so we let them lead the way with the GPS unit and everyone exchanged trinkets.

L. was put in charge of tracking the Travel Bug online and reporting its progress to the club each month. Earning points for the race involves quite a bit of math (points for miles traveled as well as each cache, state and country it visits) so it will be a good practical math project for her.

We're hoping to get lucky with the 4-H Walker like some others the kids have launched in the past.

Hiking Doggie saw a lot of action in New Zealand for a couple of years but he hasn't moved since March. We're hoping with the southern hemisphere's start of spring that he'll be moving along again soon. But some of our other TBs have been MIA for a while so things don't always work out.

But Wee Scotty has been busy in Europe recently and the geocachers there have been great with sharing photos of his adventures. He's in the Wildkirchli caves in Switzerland right now.

But he started off in the US before he made the leap to Europe.

You can download a Google Earth file from geocaching.com that plots all the geocaches a Travel Bug has visited for you. It's pretty cool.

The kids understand anything can happen with this TB race. They're hoping the geocachers of the world take good care of the 4-H Walker and keep it moving -- at least until May 2008 (when the official part of the race ends).