The Travels of Mickey Tom (2)

[This post continues yesterday’s. I won’t redefine any of the terminology here, so if you find yourself a little confused it probably just means you need to read that one.]

In the fall of 2003, The Missus and I were preparing to host her sisters, brother, and their families for Thanksgiving.

At the time, the four families were holding annual “reunions” like this, one purpose of which was to remember their parents, Mabel and Tom, who had died a few years earlier. “Events” (such as they were) thus were frequently on a Mabel-and-Tom theme; for instance, since Mabel loved playing Bingo, there was an annual “Mabel Bingo” night. They also gave out prizes for this sort of thing, such as used books by people named Mabel or Lyndall (which was Tom’s real first name).

Now, The Missus and I love games: cards, PC and console-video games, board games, and yes, Bingo. She tends to be the more aggressively competitive one; I like to win, of course, but also tend more to trying to figure out in advance how best to achieve victory.

So we decided that year that we would come up with a new “game” for the four families to play. We called it Tom’s Snipe Hunt.

Why “snipe hunt”? Here’s what Wikipedia says about the phrase:

A snipe hunt, a form of wild goose chase that is also known as a fool’s errand, is one of a class of practical jokes that involves experienced people making fun of newcomers by giving them an impossible or imaginary task. The origin of the term is a practical joke where inexperienced campers are told about a bird or animal called the snipe as well as a usually ridiculous method of catching it, such as running around the woods carrying a bag or making strange noises. Incidentally, the snipe (a family of shorebirds) is difficult to catch for experienced hunters, so much so that the word “sniper” is derived from it to refer to anyone skilled enough to shoot one.

Naturally we weren’t sending people on a wild goose chase — there’d be prizes, after all — but we were sending them into the woods on a quest of sorts, the Friday after Thanksgiving. Geocaching, as you may have guessed.

The general outline of how we set this up was to break everyone up into two teams of four or five players each, called The Toms and The Mabels. Each team was issued a Ziploc bag containing:

• Strips of colored/patterned fabric to tie around their heads, a la what the Survivor reality show calls “buffs.” (The two teams’ buffs were different, of course.)
• Directions to that team’s starting point, to which they’d have to travel by car. (Each team had a different starting point and a different target geocache, but their destinations were about equidistant from our house.)
• A handheld GPS unit. (The latitude/longitude for each team’s geocache had already been entered into its GPS unit, establishing what’s called a “waypoint” to which the team would be navigating.)
• Instructions for operating the GPS unit.
• A printout of the geocaching.com page for that team’s cache.
• A small plastic Disney figurine — Minnie Mouse, for The Mabels, and Mickey Mouse, for The Toms. Hence the figurines (and corresponding travel-bug dogtags’) names: Minnie Mabel and Mickey Tom.

After we distributed the “mission kits,” we gave the two teams ten or fifteen minutes to familiarize themselves with the GPS units’ operation and to ask questions. Then we launched them on their way.

Their objective: Get to the geocache, place their travel bug in the cache, and call us on a cell phone with unique information about the cache so we’d know they were really there. (We’d gone out a couple days ahead of time and signed each cache’s logbook.) While at the cache, they should feel free to take ONE souvenir item from the cache. (Only one of the teams did this, though.) First team to call us won the prize (whatever it was).

Funnily enough — well, for The Missus and me — that Friday was unusually chilly for North Florida, even in late November. The sky was gray, the wind brisk, and the air damp-verging-on-mist. We’d succeeded in hosting the big dinner the day before, so after the two teams pulled out of our driveway in their respective states of high excitement, she and I felt no qualms at all about pouring ourselves generous, umm, warming beverages, putting our feet up, and watching TV as we waited for the phone to ring.

The Toms made the winning phone call. (Entertainingly or ironically, depending on your perspective, The Toms were also the less athletic and less competition-driven team. On the teams’ return to our house, there was much grumbling and dirt-scuffing among The Mabels.) And both teams successfully placed their travel bugs.

Now, when you set up a travel bug at geocaching.com, you can — and usually do — provide some sort of comments or description. Mickey Tom and Minnie Mabel had actual missions, itineraries, assigned to them.

The original Mabel and Tom had made their way to Jacksonville, Florida, before meeting, falling in love, and getting married. But before Jacksonville, they’d started out Up North. Mabel was born in Wisconsin; Tom, in western Kentucky.

So we thought, well, at the time of registering the TBs, maybe we could see if we could recreate the originals’ itineraries. Here’s Mickey Tom’s “current goal,” as recorded on geocaching.com:

I need to get to Kentucky, preferably the South Carrollton/Central City area. (That’s where Tom’s journey started.) And then I need to get to Jacksonville, Florida, where I can meet up with my sweetheart: Minnie Mabel!

And here’s Minnie Mabel’s:

I need to get to Eau Claire, Wisconsin. (That’s where Mabel’s journey started.) From there I need to travel to Jacksonville, Florida, to meet my future sweetie: Mickey Tom. (He’s swell!)

How long would it take, we wondered, for Tom to get to that area of Kentucky, for Mabel to return to Wisconsin — moved like chess pieces, a cache at a time across country from the Florida Big Bend ultimately to Jacksonville? Months? Years?

As it happened, we’d failed to account for two possible hitches.

First, there was simple human… error? failure? Geocaching is not an activity pursued by everyone with equal tenacity. Geocachers come and go. They visit caches and optimistically grab a treasure or a travel bug, assuming they’ll be at another cache soon. “Soon” becomes “eventually”; days turn into months which turn into years which turn into never. We eventually lost track of Minnie Mabel for this reason. Her last sighting was in March, 2005, when she was picked up by a geocacher at a cache (itself since deactivated) southwest of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

(Her last last log entry read, “Picked Up Minne Mabel, will get her further east and possibly to Eau Claire shortly.” The cacher even posted a photo of her, onsite, as you can see here. As near as I can tell, the last geocaching activity involving this cacher was in May 2006. This was in connection with a travel bug — a bobbie bin — called (ominously) “Hair Today, Gone to Texas,” whose mission, of course, was to get to Texas. But the cacher him/herself had already dropped off the geocaching.com activity list.)

The second thing which went wrong is that geocachers don’t always check to see what a TB’s mission/goal might be, before depositing it in the next cache they visit. So both Minnie Mabel (before she was lost) and Mickey Tom took numerous detours, shall we say, en route to their destinations.

Mickey Tom is still going strong. As of last week, he’d finally made it to Kentucky, after visiting nearly 50 caches over a route nearly 18,000 miles long. He’s been to British Columbia (he spent a long time up there); he’s been (briefly) to Hawaii. He’s had three pictures taken and logged by geocachers, including one of him standing inside the mouth of a Confederate cannon’s barrel. That’s his complete route to date, per Google Earth, in the screen capture at the bottom of this post. (Click for a full-size enlargement.)

And now, finally, after nearly three years on (and off!) the road, he’s only 90-some miles from the real Tom’s birthplace. (There’s always the chance, of course, that he’ll get waylaid again. On the other hand, as The Missus says, “Daddy would have loved this — he loved to travel!”)

And then, then we start counting the days and miles till he gets to Jacksonville.

In the meantime, we’re considering a relaunch of the Minnie Mabel project. We’d still like to have the two TBs end up in Jacksonville — maybe in the same cache — at the same time. But this time around, I think we’ll just settle for getting her to Wisconsin and back.