If Your Travel Bug Goes Missing

From the weekly Groundspeak LoBot Mailer:

1. Send a polite email to the geocacher who last grabbed your Travel Bug and remind them of its goal. Please allow adequate time before sending this message; remember that this geocacher may be on vacation or have other extenuating circumstances for which they cannot go geocaching.

2. If you have not received a response and you feel your Travel Bug is lost forever, mark the Travel Bug as "missing" so that another geocacher does not expect to find it in a cache.

3. To prevent your Travel Bug from being lost or mistaken as a signature item, place it a zip-loc bag with a printed mission. The more obvious you make it, the less likely it will be kept as a trading item.

My only comment on these items involves the Ziploc® bag recommendation: How many Travel Bugs (and, for that matter, caches) have you seen in flimsy, hole-ridden Ziploc bags? Water always seems to get in anyway, so why bother? Unless you're using one of the heavy-duty freezer bags (and those will eventually leak, also), just work to make your Travel Bug itself resistant to the elements.

Other ideas or comments?

Read more about trackable items.