Bug and Breakfast – TB Hotel

The Bug and Breakfast - TB Hotel geocache (GC5CXNE) was placed on 16 September 2014 by FrightFX and FamousMrGilbert in the gardens of McMenamins Edgefield, half an hour east of Portland (Oregon, USA). It is a TB hotel: a cache roomy enough to serve as a relay for trackables, those travelling items geocachers move from box to box towards the goal their owner has set them. You drop off the one you are carrying, pick up another, and the journey goes on. Here the relay is taken literally: a miniature three-room inn, lounge included, with a little fire and lighting — the owner suggests coming at sunset, without waiting for nightfall.

The setting has a harsher history. Edgefield opened in 1911 as the Multnomah County poor farm, then the largest county-funded relief institution in Oregon: up to 614 residents in 1935, before a conversion into a nursing home and a closure in 1982. Added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1990, the estate was bought that same year by the McMenamin brothers: the grounds now hold a hotel, a brewery, a distillery, a vineyard, a cinema, a soaking pool and a concert stage, with gardens whose vegetable plots and orchards still supply the kitchens.

The owner invites you to wander around, taking care not to give away where the cache is. Geocaching HQ picked it out among the favorite caches of its employees, and it has been collecting favorites for ten years.