Geocoins are often very stunning now though, and barely resemble coins sometimes! The best place to discover coins is at events, where cachers often bring their coins with them for the sole purpose of showing them off and allowing them to be "discovered". I do this with the coins I have bought these last few years which I have never allowed myself to release out into the wild.
Travel Bugs are slightly different - they don't have to be very valuable at all and aren't really there for the sole purpose of discovering (although you can, again normally at events is your best bet!) Travel Bugs are there to travel. Find a small object you want to move around the country or the world and attach a TB to it to signify that it is not a swap item. These also go missing sometimes. They will be placed in caches that get muggled or archived, might get accidentally traded or just go totally AWOL. That said, they tend to have a better track record of surviving in the wild.
Missions for TBs vary and you shouldn't pick one up unless you know what it's aiming to do. I foolishly did this when I found a TB in Abu Dhabi in the Middle East. Its mission was to go to China but I brought it home with me unaware of its goal only to find it had come from the UK! Maybe it ended up in China quicker by catching the next plane out of Gatwick, but geographically speaking it didn't make much sense to bring it back to its starting country. Only discover TBs if you're not sure of what they want to achieve. A TB's mission can be anything the owner wants it to be. Common goals are "travel the world" or "attend events" but the mission can be more specific. A rubber duck might want to visit caches by ponds and lakes, for example, and some have a very specific destination country or cache in mind.
My TBs have had varying degrees of success. A lot of them have gone missing, unfortunately. Until recently my light up hooting owl keyring had successfully completed TWO missions but is now missing. Send the Dragon an Owl was a TB I created as a way of saying thank you to a friend who had released TBs in my honour. Its first mission was to reach the cacher in question, and to my amazement it did! He took photos to prove that it had successfully reached him! After that I set it the mission of getting back to me by coming to a cache near my home called "Owl's House". Again it succeeded. My good fortune ran out after that, however, when I decided to see if I could get it to fly up to an owl themed cache near Liverpool. It has not been seen since May 2012.
My other successful TBs have been two little plastic gingerbread men (well one man and one woman) I won out of a 2p machine in an arcade. I glued a TB to the back of each and placed them together in the same cache. The mission? To race each other! "You can't catch me; I'm the gingerbread man!" To my utter amazement they are both still going strong even though they were released in August 2012. Doesn't seem like a long time, but for TBs on a mission, that's quite an achievement!
The Gingerbread Man has travelled 5291.3 miles and after a quick holiday to Spain has been batted around Germany for many months. Germany is a very good country to have a TB - alongside America and Britain, geocaching is very popular there.
The Gingerbread Woman, by contrast, has done many more miles (8821.1) and yet has travelled less. The mileage comes from crossing the Atlantic and then visiting a number of States in the USA. She has only been to a quarter of the number of caches as her husband, but when she does travel, she travels far!
I really hope that both these little TBs continue to travel far and wide. The race might not be directly against one another and my little married biscuits might have been apart for over a year but they're both keeping themselves busy and meeting lots of really cool people. I think Mr Gingerbread might have picked up some German too!
