Hello Again, Little Buddy!

I’m not big into trackables, primarily because of a tragic loss a few years ago, but also because I run into fewer caches large enough to house them.  Consequently, I’d been rolling around with the same half dozen of them since at least Cumming and Birmingham.  You might think that’s a long time to roll with the same ones, but I would have to disagree since I rolled with one of the lost ones for over three years, but that’s neither here nor there.  At Challenge in Taylor, I had intended to switch out the ones I had with fresh ones, but I was a little busy.  If I had managed to hit the table, I might have seen an older trackable I put out that passed through the pile (I wonder if it still has any pathtags in it), but that’s not important, either (though it is still showing as being in an Oklahoma cache, which is a little concerning though not salient now).  What is important is that I finally managed to switch them out at the Maker Magic Event I attended over the weekend with fresh ones and ended up picking up a trackable that I had carried around for quite a while and dropped a month ago.  Someone in attendance picked it up the day before the Event, and dropped it at the Event, putting it back into my hands.  There was a time when I would have said it was meant to be, but I’m less impressed with trackables than I once was.  Admittedly, it’s not often that I have them return to me like this but, then again, it wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened. 

I used to care more about trackables.  I can remember a time when running across one was a guarantee it would get scooped up so I could take it somewhere.  Now, I don’t even bother unless it’s something interesting and/or I’m already going somewhere it wants to go.  The only trackables I really truly care about are my nametag and, of course, my long suffering but trusty umbrella.  I used to care more about a pair of trackables I sent out for the Girls, but both of them seem to have met their deaths I think, one in California by way of Hawaii and London, the other after spending years bouncing around Spain, Germany, and The Netherlands.  Neither has been logged in over three years, so I believe them to be lost.  And those are the most successful ones.  I’ve had ones not leave the state before disappearing.  So many of them are in the hands of single- and double-digit cachers.  How many have been taken and forgotten or lost?  I had one trackable go a year and a half without being logged because someone lost it in their car.  When they found it, they put it into a cache to keep moving and it was never heard from again.  I easily have a couple dozen travel bugs/trackable tags that I could send out into the world, but what’s the point?  I don’t trust the world with them so there feels like little point in sending them out.  But I might give it one more try.  It’s not like I don’t have some things that could easily become trackables.  And I must not be completely over them because I take care of the trackables of others.  So my conundrum is defined: do I stick with trackables or do I divest myself of the ones I have and leave them be?