On Location

A couple of nights ago, I was out of town on grounds I rarely stomp. I ran down to San Marcos for dinner with some caching friends. It wasn’t an Event or anything. We just gathered to talk about some stuff and things and preparations for [REDACTED]. I ended up being unexpectedly early because traffic between there and Austin was somehow not as rough as it traditionally is. And, of course, I needed a cache for the day, so that time afforded me a good opportunity to grab one. I had scoped out caches in that area the evening before. My eye was immediately drawn to one that was easy and coincidentally contained the name of the restaurant (without explicitly endorsing it, of course). Shucks! What were the odds that the two would be somehow related? I got to the restaurant and ran into someone from my party who had also arrived early. The two of us walked up a big hill (for a parking lot) and found the cache sitting between a rock wall, a tree, and a wooden fence. A couple of signatures later, we were taken care of for the day from a caching perspective.

Five of us assembled for dinner. We ate (the food was meh). We talked (the company was lovely). We discussed happenings and whatnot. When we were done, we trudged back up that hill so the other members of the party could grab the cache in the parking lot. We decided to grab a couple more before we broke for the evening. The first one was a Virtual that wasn’t on my map for some reason; I just followed the others to it. Arriving cleared up that mystery: it was the Virtual at the Hays County Courthouse. As we all piled out for it, standing in the shadow of the beast, someone rightly mentioned that I must already have it. Indeed. We decided on snagging one more at a local nature center. Unfortunately, that Traditional was inside the locked iron fence. However, there was an Adventure Lab at the site, centered on a giant fiberglass mermaid. That was easy enough to claim, but it saddened me to see (or not see, as the case may be) that she was missing something. She usually holds in her hand a representation of San Marcos’s longtime attraction, Ralph the Swimming Pig. I don’t know if he was the victim of an accident or vandalism, but it all seemed less for his absence. But I had two caches for the day, so no complaints. With that accomplished, we all headed to our homes after having a lovely time (despite torrential rain almost the moment we departed).