DNF x6

A few days ago I went out to grab some caches outside of town. I decided to double my fun by hitting a bunch of cemeteries, a couple of which have been on my radar for a while. The first one was easy-ish. A cemetery attached to a church but it occurred to me as I was pulling up on it that it’s Sunday and they might be having services. I never get involved with that. Luckily the services were over. Unluckily I managed to show up just as the pastor and his son were getting ready to leave and they wanted to chat up the obvious stranger. So we talked about photography and cemeteries and being in the middle of nowhere and all that good stuff and gave them the impression that I’m a tourist passing through. That was good enough for them and, after giving me their card so I could send them any really good shots I took, they headed out.

The cemetery, like the church, was a German one. The cache itself was unremarkable, a pill bottle inside a tree stump. Unfortunately, it was in there so tight that I scraped myself up pretty good getting to it. This would be the only cache I picked up all day.

Down the road was another cemetery, a family cemetery of the namesakes of a nearby town. When I got there, not only were there no stones, but there was the stone sign for a subdivision and a house was under construction nearby. I drove about two miles away to another one. That cemetery was actually there, but the cache was gone because new subdivision construction across the street took out the tree it was in. Then I drove into a different nearby town and hit the local cemetery. That one was nowhere to be found. It might have been there, but there was at least one tree that had fallen over since it was last found and tons of trash around. My time was growing short so I called it for the day, with the thought of going out that night and picking a few easy ones up.

So once evening approaches, I slipped out and decided to grab something from a series. I actually made reference to it a thousand posts ago (actually 71 posts ago, but who’s counting? [I should really add an archive]), a series of zombie caches stretching from Round Rock to Bastrop. I’ve picked up most of the northern ones so I reached out to the east, going around the city. Easy park and grabs because it’s a time trial series. Except not so much. I get to the first one and there’s an overgrown field. I checked the logs and nobody has found it in forever and the store that used to be there was demolished. I went to the next one and the next one after that. Nothing to be found. And I just called it for the day.

You veteran cachers have have had days like this. But this is for newer cachers. Days like this can be disheartening. It can be hard to be denied over and over again. But days like this are balanced out by days where you walk away with 15 or 20. Keep at it. Don’t lose heart. Don’t let it get you down.