So I thought I’d pull together a geocaching glossary with a few terms you’ll hear and see when in the world of geocaching and share in this geocache blog:

Cache - the short name for a geocache. It can refer to either the actual hide or the verb “I went caching today”

Logbook - this is the paper inside the geocache hide where you write your name and the date you found it. The geocaching logbook is how it is referred to or just shortened to ‘log’

Micro Geocache – just like the name suggests, this is a small hide. It’s usually about the size of a 35mm film cannister. The harder ones are NANO hides which are the size of your fingernail, magnetic, and REALLY hard to find. For me the hardest thing is getting out the log to sign it and then getting it back in.

Muggles - Yep, just like in Harry Potter, the people that don’t know about the magic of geocaching are called Muggles. Geocache hides that go missing are often said to have been ‘muggled’

TFTC – lots of acronyms to save you time and space on a log to write. This is “Thanks For The Cache”

TNLFSL- another common acronym. Geocaching etiquette is to take something and leave something in return. But if you did not take anything then you can write this acronym for “Took Nothing, Left Nothing, Signed Log”

TravelBug or TB or GeoCoins – a geocache hide stays in one place, but some people like to see their items go from hide to hide, so a TravelBug was created with a Tracking number that meant you could see it go around the world! The TBs often are coins – called GeoCoins. A standard TB is in the form of a dog tag. I once say a kid with a t-shirt who was tagged as a TravelBug. So really anything is possible.

Geosense – like a 6th sense but instead how you start to think like a geocacher whenever you are looking for a hide. Once you find a cache in a lampost, you’ll never look at them again, because you now have geosense. This is the hard when you start to learn how to geocache.

You can find more terminology listed at the Main Geocaching website in the glossary.

I like to take a photo of a Travel Bug to post online for the owner to be able to see the places it has visited as well as track it on a map.

Here’s a travel bug that is called “Spidy”.

Here’s an Moo-Cow Travel Bug at the ocean in Monterey, California

Here’s the map you see to track where your travel bug has been – there are log entries for each of the places it has been from the people that find it