What Has Been Will Be Again

What has been done will be done again.  There is nothing new under the sun.  Or some kind of crap like that.

I grabbed a daily cache at another one of the murals that had recently received new hides.  I knew this one well.  Not only had I grown up in the area, but I had found a cache here before, in the same place and hidden in the same manner.  The only difference was that the previous one had been a nano instead of a pill bottle.  It surprises me a little that I’ve been doing this long enough to see hide locations getting recycled.  It also surprises me that I’ve been doing this long enough that I think of new names on logs as random noobs until I’ve seen their handles around for a while or have met them in person.  It feels like it hasn’t been that long since I was new to the game, signing “Atreides was here!” to my first cache in downtown Austin.   Then again, I have to remember that it happened almost five years ago.  I remember how bewildered I was searching for my first LPC, or finding my first D5.  I’ll never forget that Christmas Event when I brought a package of containers for the newest cacher in attendance, and it turned out to be me.  At the same time, I always feel perpetually new to things.  I hear the stories from folks who had the greatest adventure finding a cache a decade or more ago.  So many of the cachers in the area have known each other for so long it’s almost insane.  It’s a weird place to be sometimes, between novel and ennobled.  But at moments like that, I take a deep breath, remember what I have done and what I have yet to accomplish, and remind myself that sometimes (and by “sometimes,” I mean usually), I think too much. 

You know what is worthy of thought?  The Mothership’s new challenge!  Easy is five finds, medium is ten finds, hard is a hundred finds.  So I have four weeks to find a hundred caches (because, of course, I’m going to go the hard route)?  I’ve pretty much cored out this town of all but the newest or craziest caches, so I might be going a little farther afield over the next month.  Twenty-five a week is eminently doable, especially since Adventure Labs count towards the total.  I guess I can’t get all pensive if I’m busy finding caches, no?