Can you believe it?

A warm welcome home to Suntanned Daffy Duck. Daffy is one of our geocaching travel bugs - a little toy with an ID tag and a mission that is entirely dependant on the goodwill of fellow geocachers to achieve the mission. Daffy's mission was to travel the world and cover more miles than his fellow travel bug Suntanned Spider Man. Spider Man covered 28,209 miles - how many miles did Daffy Duck cover?

Spider Man was despatched in February 2005, returning home October 2006. His mission was to travel the world, visit New York and climb the Empire State Building. In those twenty months he achieved his main goal up the Empire State on a very misty day, (see right) courtesy of a fellow US-based cacher, and visited four countries South Africa, USA (eight states), Norway and Sweden.

Bear in mind that we had no control over Daffy Duck. He was placed in a "cache" (a lunch box hidden in the UK countryside), retrieved by a random cacher, moved to another cache, retrieved by another cacher - and so the chain went on. Daffy took a little longer - one month short of five years - and visited three countries Australia, Canada (six states), and Germany. At no time were we able to control his journey. So, the big question, did he beat Spider Man's journey and, if so, by how much? Yes he did - by one mile! 28,210 miles.

So here they are safely home.

A timely footnote. Sadly, not all travel bugs make it. On Saturday 9 July 2005, we despatched a travel bug to celebrate London being awarded the Olympics and to remember those affected by the 7/7 London bombs the day after London was awarded the Games. The mission was to visit each of the 2012 Olympics candidate cities - Madrid, Moscow, New York, Paris (in any order) and return to London. Unfortunately this bug made it to America and was in Pennsylvania en route to New York when it vanished without trace.