Not able to attend the World Cup Games in Germany myself, I am at least happy to say that a little part of our soccer history is there.

As I have written before, we sometimes do geocaching (the high tech treasure hunt game) around home and when we travel. It’s a great sport in that you are able to exercise almost painlessly as you focus on finding the goods (the caches).

As part of the sport, people can buy Travel Bugs (think military dog tags) and give each of these bugs a goal as it travels from cache to cache through the kindness of fellow cachers.

We have created three different TB personas and one of them, the Soccer Travel Bug, has been traveling widely throughout this country, the United Kingdom and now Germany since its launch two years ago.

This bug has been given a lot of support because of its goal, which was to find its way to England and visit a Manchester United soccer game before heading back to the states. It did spend a good bit of time in England, was returned to PA, its home base and then was whisked away to Germany.

Several of the cachers who found the TB in caches took its mission to heart and decided to give the bug the time of its short soccer life. Some of their comments:

There’s a field. There’s mud. What more do you need for football? (1/12/05)

Hey, the ball is in Germany and in a few months all the stars are playing here. It’s time for the World Cup. (11/6/05)

Goaaaaaal……. (2/26/06)

Can’t tell whether it has reached its goal already. .  . Why not linger in Germany for awhile? (5/17/06)

Germany will win the Championship!!! (6/11/06)

Now that the World Cup has been decided, the Soccer TB is on the move again and has to make its way back home. I don’t think it will be too happy, though, about just sitting around in Pennsylvania Tupperware caches now that’s it has seen some of the world -- and so much good soccer!

By Teresa K. Flatley

www.boomthis.com