December 16 : Trackable : Don’s Gin Tonic Rabbit

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

Don’s Gin Tonic Rabbit

Like my owner, I love travelling and drinking Gin Tonics. My mission is to see nice hotels/hostels and bars and even planes and airports!  ‘Nice’ doesn’t have to be ‘expensive’,of course. Any hotel, hostel, bar or plane you like and which has an interesting touch or view is well worth it.
If possible, and the barkeeper allows it, take a picture with me at a bar with a bottle of Gin. Preferably with Hendrick’s or Bombay Sapphire, but that’s just my owners personal preference…  Please handle me with care and take me to places around the world. My sleeping bag is my ziploc bag and I like to stay in there when staying in a cache.
I know that I’m really cute; I was given to my owner as a present from his beautiful girlfriend at Easter 2010 at the Ramada Resort in Cochin/India. That is actually quite a nice hotel…

Having written its mission statement (above) the rabbit set off from Zurich Airport in May 2010, for a short trip to Gibraltar.   It then toured Germany until July 2012, before another holiday in the Canary Islands.    By March 2013, and it’s not clear how it happened, the rabbit ended up on the coastal path in North Wales.   The next geocacher who picked it up mislaid it and it resurfaced in June 2022 (!) after a house move.   It was dropped off in a cache series just south of London, where it spent the winter in a little-visited cache, before moving on to West Horsley, in Surrey, where we picked in up in December 2023.

We wondered how the rabbit had stayed so clean and neat, when it had been out travelling for 14 years, and why it had only moved 11,000 miles in that time (many trackables of a similar age would have clocked up 50,000 miles in that time).   There are several reasons, we think:

• The ZipLock ‘sleeping bag’ keeps it nice and dry
• For 9 of those 14 years, it wasn’t moving, it was mislaid.
• It’s a fairly big trackable, so it’s harder to place in a cache, meaning it spends less time actually in caches, and more time tucked in a cacher’s house/bag/car waiting for the next adventure.

Anyway, the rabbit is well and happy and will move on to more gin-related adventures … when we can find a cache big enough!