Europa

To visit all countries on the continent called Europe and bring a memento for each of them.

Princess Europa lived in Phoenicia (present-day Lebanon) when she was abducted by the Greek god Zeus disguised as a white bull. He carried her overseas to the Mediterranean island of Crete, where she became the first queen of Crete (see this page for more information). She lends her name to the western part of the Eurasian continent, west of the Ural mountains and the Bosporus. The Euopean Union now counts 25 member states, but the European continent has many more, especially since the disintegration of the Yugoslavian republic and the USSR. To get a glimpse of the staggering diversity of people and cultures on the old continent, the travelbug Europa wants to visit all territories and bring something to remember from each of them. Most territories are independent countries, but there's also a number of autonomous regions. I've made a (very arbritrary) list of 50 countries/territories that is shown here below. Each country has its own two pages, where the geocacher that visits the country can paste a souvenir, write about the visit or make a drawing. There are two extra blank pages for territories that you think deserve a separate mention. I will try to keep the table on this page up to date, based on the logs, so it should be immediately clear which countries still need to be visited (logged countries have a dark green background, and light green is for countries that have been logged inside the logbook, but without Europa seeing a cache from the inside). So this TB has a double log: one online for the tag, one inside the booklet. I've made the booklet as small as possible (12 x 8.5 x 1 cm), so it should fit in small caches as well. But if there are only microcaches around, you can also do a touch & go: drop it off and take it along in one go, and deposit it in a bigger cache elsewhere. A few countries in the list (Belarus, Moldova) do not have geocaches yet, although in the time it will take TB Europa to get there, this may have changed. If her visit happens to be before the creation of any geocaches, you can log the country inside the logbook, but make sure to have a memento that proves that TB Europa actually was there (bus ticket with date, for example). Please always mention the date and your name, and make some effort to make something nice of the pages for each country. Just writing the date and your name is definitely not enough. If you find TB Europa during a geocaching event, please don't log your visit inside, this will just take up valuable space. Europa is NOT an event log, she prefers to keep souvenirs of the places she has been, not just names of people. If TB Europa manages to get through this long journey unscathed and to have all her pages filled, she would like to go back to where she came from, the geographical centre of Belgium (Center Cache, GCC2DD).