Being a curious sort, I checked out the web address to see what this was all about. Turns that even though this website was new to me, Where's George has been around since 1998. It's meant to be a fun way to track where dollar bills have been. Some people, apparently, really get into this, having entered 1,000 bills or more into the system. It sounded like the site once sold a rubber stamp used to mark the bills, but doesn't do so anymore. However, there are online sources for similar rubber stamps.
I followed the simple directions for entering my dollar bill into the system, and was rewarded with the following information from the Where's George Currency Tracking Report:
Date first entered: June 2004. "Found at the Fast Lane Drive-Thru in Saginaw", it was reported.
This dollar bill hadn't been tracked very much since then. It didn't show up again in Where's George until September 2013, where it had surfaced in the Traverse City area. After that, it next returned to the Currency Tracking Report almost a full year later. To my amusement, someone had gotten the bill about a month ago while playing keno at a bar a little ways north of here. (receiving it as change at a thrift store seems more tame by comparison!)
Thus, not a very well-traveled bill, or else not tracked very diligently by those who may have had it in their possession since 2004. I would have liked to give the bill a chance to go out of state, but alas, we don't have any such travel plans for awhile.
So instead, I used the dollar bill to buy some cucumbers at our local farmer's market this morning. The market gets its share of out-of-town visitors, so maybe someone from somewhere else will get the bill and enter it into the Where's George system. It'll be fun to track this bill and see where it ends up!
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