This weekend, the girls visited me for Easter. Consequently, Friday afternoon, I made a drive up to Leon County, halfway between Austin and Longview, to pick them up. After some dinner and a request to stop at Buc-ee’s on the way down, we hit the road for home. Since I had just gotten off work, I hadn’t had time to grab my cache for the day, so we took a little detour in one of the many small towns to grab one, a key box residing at a sculpture park. After signing it, we continued on to Buc-ee’s, stopping to visit the facilities and pick up some cherry sours. I was surprised to find that there was an Adventure Lab series that had appeared since the last time I stopped there! However, unlike when I did the one in Wimberly, I had phone connectivity! I picked up a quick five finds, getting me that much closer to the hundred needed for the Wheel of Challenges this month. The caching daughter doesn’t seem to be interested in Labs, but to each their own. Her loss, no?
The next day, during some pre-Easter errands, I noticed that I hadn’t found one yet, so I dragged the girls to one of the new mural caches that had sprouted up recently. The visit was a little bittersweet. The mural was on the wall of a recently closed local institution, a drugstore that had been open since 1951 and was famous for its restaurant counter. We had been there ourselves before the pandemic for milkshakes and floats. I’m not entirely sure that the girls remembered, but that’s the way life is sometimes. Across the street, outside of a plant nursery, we found our quarry, a bison in a tree. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.
Easter involved some family, some friends, and some food. There were also fewer dyed eggs than in previous years, but the kids have gotten to an age where Easter egg hunts are less desirable than being cool and being teenagers doing teenager things. Thus, also, is life. After a healthy dose of lunching and girls and niece and nephew, I had to get them back to their mother. We took to the road again but were pressed for time, which made me sad because we didn’t have time for a cache on the way up. This was doubly sad because I noticed a couple of FTF opportunities in Robertson County. I would have loved to take the girls to get an FTF. That didn’t stop me from taking a shot at one of them on the way back home. Unfortunately, the rains of the last few days made the area less like woods and more like a swamp. I was neither dressed for marsh nor particularly interested in trudging around in ankle-deep water. But there was a cache to be found in a nearby cracked building foundation not located in swampy terrain. I would have liked to add a new FTF to my stats, but in the end, a cache is a cache is a cache. With that, I continued on home and prepared to face the new week’s travails.
Not every cache is epic or awesome. Sometimes, it’s the company that makes them good. But if you don’t have company, just keep on caching.
Geocaching While Black 