GPS Maze - Pacific Science Center Geocoin

This coin took a nice comfy 4.5 year vacation while I was off adventuring, learning what "powder" and "spring corn" is, and busting my rear end in grad school.

So the mission: get this coin back to one of my caches in Southeastern Wyoming, The Currency Center or Book It! No air travel! Move me only by ground travel!

This... now this coin you're holding is a piece of geocaching history, friend.

I activated this coin and placed it in my good friend Bloodhounded's cache back at the end of 2010. Bloodhounded is somewhat of a northeast Pennsylvanian celebrity. Runs a caching blog, creates the most amazing hides - not just challenging stuff (like my friend keoki_eme), but clever, too. He's got an artistic talent to the game that geocaching has been sorely missing in my new home. Anyway, this coin: it survived a whole two transfers until, in early 2011, it was lost as the ammo can cache it was in slid into a drainage (or something) and disappeared forever.

Young cachers, I assure you, this is normal travel bug behavior. Release 10, maybe one or two make it more than a few months.

Here's what's not normal:

In the summer of 2015, four and a half years later, Unimoggers (another awesome Pennsylvania player, by the way), while out scrambling around for a completely different hide, found the lost ammo can, and with it, my lost coin. (And, by the way, completed it's original goal to circumnavigate the globe.)

Now, maybe this isn't like finding buried treasure, but it's pretty significant to me. I activated this little coin in my first year of geocaching. Geocaching brought me to windmills, rivers, and outlooks that I hadn't even known existed in my previous two-and-a-half decades of living in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Five years later, that little league adventuring was the bedrock that now drives me to get lost in snowstorms, or climb gigantic rock piles, or do whatever this is.

So this coin, this little game, and the great community around it, sparked a love of outdoor adventuring in geeky scientist. I think that's a pretty big deal.

Original mission (Completed 2015, thanks Unimoggers!)

My mission is seemingly simple: I want to travel to New Jersey. It's a bit more complicated than that, though: PLEASE ONLY MOVE ME WEST. This coin under no circumstances wants to travel east. So move me towards the setting sun and get me to New Jersey!