Unfamiliar Stacks

I had some time to kill over the weekend and was thinking about my cache for the day. A lot of new caches had been dropping around my home in the last couple of weeks, so I was on the lookout for unfamiliar ones when I noticed one I hadn’t seen before. It was a Multi-cache at a library on the east side of town, only a couple of months old. How had I not noticed this before? Who cares? It was on my radar now!

The library, named after an early activist and founder of the Mexican/Tejano community in Austin, was actually unfamiliar to me. It was really close to where I grew up, but when I was a child, my grandparents maintained that north of a certain street was the Black part of town and south was the Mexican part. It’s funny how the distance of a mile can be an entire world away. History was secondary for my purposes, though. There was caching to do!

The Multi was centered on a lamppost outside the building. Imagine my surprise to find that there was nothing but cobwebs and bolts under the skirt! Luckily, a previous finder (the FTF, specifically) was kind enough to note that the coordinates were off. It was a short enough distance to be found with a quick look around but far enough to cause momentary confusion. The description of the cache location had been worded in such a way as to denote more than one place. Whether or not that was intentional, I don’t know. What I do know is that once I found the redirector, I cracked it open to find a poem leading me inside. I slipped inside and began my search under the notice of the librarians at the desk and the patrons engaged in their activities.

After some consultation with the Dewey Decimal System, I went to the appropriate shelf, pulled the appropriate book, and voilà! One more smiley for the pile! Since the cache was a decent size, larger than anything I had found recently, I took the opportunity to drop a couple of trackables in it, too. My surreptitious work accomplished (he said as if the cache hadn’t been placed by a librarian), I slipped off again. I went on with the rest of my day to grab a few challenge caches to replenish my steadily dwindling supply, but that’s a story for another time. Or not.