travel bug

English

Etymology

From the trademark Travel Bug.

Noun

travel bug (plural travel bugs)

1. A tag stamped with a number, placed in a geocache (often attached to another item, called a hitchhiker) so that subsequent finders can take it to other caches and track its movement around the world.
   • Geocaching for Schools and Communities (page 182)

     The teams placed their travel bugs in a geocache and listed the bugs on the geocaching.com Web site […]

   • 2015, Christopher Holden, et al: Mobile Media Learning, page 168:

     Because moving travel bugs is a practice that is only physical in nature—you find the travel bug and then you move it to another geocache—the game's design did not require players to take part in as much conversation as I had hoped.

2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see travel,‎ bug.

   Synonym: wanderlust

   After my trip to New Zealand, I caught the travel bug: now I go abroad several times a year.