In Search Of New Counties?

A buddy of mine created a series of caches with an interesting conceit: they’re all Multis, each dedicated to a different fictional Texas county, mostly from literature. He was inspired when he ran across a county-counting website that counted only 253 of the 254 counties in Texas. He wanted to find that missing county and discovered a bunch of other Texas counties many of us had never heard of. I managed to get an FTF on one of them a few months ago on, dedicated to Klail City, Belken County. A month ago, after posting his series, he asked if there was a place he had missed. As fate would have it, there was. One of my favorite movies, Lone Star, is set in the fictional border town of Frontera in Rio County. Imagine my surprise to see a newly minted cache dedicated to Rio County! I wanted to be FTF on that one, but it is down the street from another cacher who loves FTFs as well. He got it within an hour of its publishing. Therefore, Rio County took a backseat for me. Well, a couple of days ago, I decided it was time. I drove over to a park north of Austin and found the redirector. A few minutes and a few calculations later, I was in the wooded edges, pulling a log out of a shotgun shell.

I know this sounds dumb, but, being a county cacher, I’ve gotten a fun little thrill from grabbing these caches. After all the counties of Texas, I find it funny to get caches representing new Texas counties. I miss the days when I could go out for a day and visit a few new places. A weekend would be an entire adventure that would captivate for weeks. Obviously, I’ve done a lot of things since those days, things I’m proud of and enjoyed doing, but they didn’t have quite the same feeling as those first heady days. I miss those days. I miss being out on the road. I miss it all being new and shiny and special. And I can’t get them back. I can only see them in the rearview mirror. But for now, at least I can get some new counties (or the equivalent, sort of) and think of the days that once were. Or some kind of crap like that.