68. Leakey, Real County

Have you ever played a video game, probably something from the mid to late 2000’s, where you’re traveling from one zone to another and there’s a fog at the edge of your vision obscuring how far you can see until you get into the new zone? Well, that’s what this was like.

Because it was daylight, I was lucky enough to see this far. but when I got out of it, everything changed. I went from a flat, dusty land where you could imagine ranches (I saw at least three small herds of longhorns on the drive [and one dead pig lying in the road]) to hills and canyon covered with green, slightly sparse, but very green nonetheless. Just before I hit town I stopped for a minute. Why? I had to pee. I try to keep these entries safe enough for kids because kids geocache and I want them to be able to enjoy these stories if they are so inclined. If you, as a parent, do not want your child to be exposed to someone talking about going to the bathroom (I think it’s silly, but I get some folks have trouble with that), cover the little ones’ eyes for a moment.

So, whenever I take these trips, I snack quite a bit and drink lots of water. As a result, with all the sitting and the drinking, I tend to pee a lot. And, of course, when you’re between towns, there’s no guarantee that there’s going to be facilities to use. As a consequence, being a man, I often stop on the side of the road or wherever I am that’s muggle free, and do my business. As I was stand in the fog outside of Leakey relieving myself, I realized that I have peed on (not just “in,” but “on”) just about every county I have ever visited. These are the things you think about when you’re me.

Leakey was one of the rare places where I got the cache first. And I got it here at Leakey Floral Cemetery. What a cemetery has to do to qualify as “floral” I’ll probably never know. But it was simple enough, a micro in a tree. It was grabbed and signed before I went looking for the courthouse.

I almost mistook it for a Lion’s Hall but the statuary gave it away. In a rare twist, I found this plinth, bearing an image of John Leakey himself. And once photography was done, I hit a gas station, where I suffered the greatest indignity of the day. I couldn’t find the switch to open the gas tank. I asked a truck driver who had stopped to fuel up if he could help me with that and we looked for a bit to no avail. I asked one of the clerks at the station for help and one came because her mother owned the same model of car (Nissan Pathfinder, if you must know. I get rentals when I travel these days, especially after “The Incident“). But she couldn’t find it either. I had a 2018 model and her mother’s was older. She also remarked that I probably had the nicest car in the county at the moment. Eventually I got enough signal to figure it out. Apparently the vehicle doesn’t have a switch. The gas door automatically unlocks when you shut off the engine and I had already gotten into the habit of leaving it running while I lock it with the fob. As a sidenote, the two biggest complaints about the vehicle I saw online were that it didn’t have great gas mileage (it was alright, but nothing to write home about) and the switch on the gas door going out so it can’t be opened…