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.
   • The teams placed their travel bugs in a geocache and listed the bugs on the geocaching.com Web site […]Geocaching for Schools and Communities (page 182)
   • 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.2015, Christopher Holden, et al: Mobile Media Learning, page 168
2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see travel, bug.
   • After my trip to New Zealand, I caught the travel bug: now I go abroad several times a year.

   Synonyms:

   wanderlust