DNF Day

Contrary to photographic evidence, Easter wasn’t the greatest caching day. My daughters and I decided to get some air and exercise in a socially isolated fashion so we started heading out of town. Driving along Highway 71, we headed out about halfway to Llano, taking a few stops along the way. There’s a series that runs along 71 for miles, but has been unmaintained for at least as long as I’ve been doing this. We stopped along the road a couple of times to take a shot at a couple of caches in the series. In almost two years, with multiple attempts, I have yet to find a cache in the series. I’m not 100% sure any have been found in forever. Of course, I have an opinion about it, but that’s neither here nor there. It was just nice to have a couple of extra sets of eyes…

We took a side road in the middle of nowhere to a lonely roadside cache but three sets of eyes couldn’t find a small near a fence and some trees, probably why it’s been lonely. We mounted back up in the car and got to going again to a subdivision, but the cache was gone from there, too. We turned back towards town and went to a cache in a parking garage, but that was a no go, too. Ultimately, I decided to cherchez la simple…

There’s always a cemetery. We were lucky enough to find one next to a convenience store so we could take a break for bathrooms and drinks, but we were not lucky enough to find a cache. Six DNFs thus far… My older daughter noted that that’s a lot of caches we didn’t find, but I told her that I’ve had similar days in the past. So I took one more look at the map and found another cemetery on the way back to Austin, off the beaten track, that had been found a few days before. This one happened to be across from a school and my eyes narrowed to watch a group of adults walking together, heading (I assume) to use a basketball court. But the destination was reached.

At this point, having attempted half a dozen caches already, the girls opted to remain in the car. I looked around and quickly found a little purple bison on the fence, completing the job that had brought us all the way out here. And once it was done, rain began to lightly sprinkle from the skies. We all headed back into town to find solace from the wet. So it wasn’t exactly fruitful but that’s alright. This was a day when the hunt was the thing, far more important than the finding…