300. Clovis, Curry County (NM01)

I am finally beginning New Mexico in earnest. I’ve already been here once, and had a lot of hair pulling and teeth gnashing because of it. Hopefully my continued adventures here will be less frustrating for months than my last. And my introductory location has not disappointed.

It’s nice that there are things on display here and draws to civic goo-gaws and dealie bobbers and all kinds of crap like that. Again, an auspicious beginning, I think. But I didn’t come all this way to hang around the courthouse. Well, actually, that’s not entirely true, but we all know that the cache is the thing, right?

There’s always a cemetery. Technically, I didn’t need to come here (I actually grabbed an LPC the night before when I arrived), but there was a challenge in a tree here that I was going to claim as the official cache, primarily because it’s a D/T I was lacking. And, for the record, despite all my accomplishments, I have not completed an entire loop yet. There’s my shame, perhaps my sin. Not really. Everyone does things differently. Quite honestly, I couldn’t care less about loops really, but I’d still like at least one, I guess. But that’s beside the point. I got the challenge, but decided to save it for another day because guess what I saw on the map? An unclaimed FTF about a mile away! I jumped in the car and got to rolling!

I really needn’t have rushed. This new cache had been waiting for 5 days to be found. That is a bit mind boggling. Back home, there’s no way on Earth that a low D/T cache like this would last this long without being found. Heck, a high D/T wouldn’t last that long unless it was pretty remote. And more than likely either the Cat and Carrot or Pflug would be the ones claiming it. But far from cache and cacher rich environments they can sit for a while between being found and FTFs are probably no different. So I took the opportunity myself. I grabbed it (it had rolled from its hiding place onto the ground so it wasn’t that hard to find), signed it, and returned it, making my first out of state FTF! W00T! Barely after sunrise, I had done quite a bit here already, but the thief of daylight, as always, was slipping it away into its sack, never to be seen again. I had so much to do and, ironically for it being so early in the morning, so little time. I got on the road, ready to take on the day, and took myself to…