With their last week of school completed and a long weekend ahead, my daughters came down to Austin to hang out and do non-Longview things! Thanks to a last-minute itinerary change, I had to pick them up in Waco. But when life gives you lemons, make lemonade!* That just meant getting out of my normal caching grounds and grabbing some. After grabbing them but before making the trip back home, we stopped at a local Wally World for one. What I thought might be a lamppost cache turned out to be an obvious (to cachers) magnetic key box stuck on the side. Who needs camo for that? It’s been my observation that most people without imagination rarely look up, and, unfortunately, that accounts for a great many muggles. I was trying to decide whether to pull out my ladder or my pole from the trunk when my younger daughter took it upon herself to jump up on the concrete base and pull it down herself. My older daughter and I signed the log (this was her 20th cache, you know) and then logged it as the younger returned it from whence she acquired it. That was very kind of her and saved me a couple of minutes fiddling with extending equipment. She made it the proverbial easy peasy lemon squeezy.
The next day, I needed to get a cache again (this keeps recurring, you know). The younger daughter was gone this time, running errands with her grandmother and cousin. Just the older daughter came along with me to grab one (how else is she going to pump up those rookie numbers?), so we popped over to a nearby one that recently appeared on the map a week ago or so. It was easy enough, a DNA tube with an attached magnet stuck to a telephone mooring cable under the sliding yellow sleeve. We scuttled to the top of a small stone wall and into some shrubbery for it. However, as easy as it was to find, the magnet had come off. The CO used hot glue to attach it, and even though it has been unseasonably cool around here, it has gotten up to ninety degrees Fahrenheit (thirty-two degrees Celsius) on several days. Texas is not conducive to hot glue on caches. If that magnet hadn’t come off yet, it would have been ready to drop off soon enough once the days started getting into the hundreds (thirty-eight or more Celsius). We signed the log and replaced the tube the best we could, putting the magnet inside and letting the CO know it could use some tender loving care.
No epic story. No clever caches or insane hikes. While in a literal sense, there were no tots nor TOTTs, that’s beside the point. I did some caching with my little girls this weekend, and that’s enough. That’s all I needed. At least for now, anyway.
* Normally, when life gives you lemons, you should either throw them back and tell life that you don’t want any stupid lemons; or clone them, arm them, and send your new army of Super Lemons to attack your enemies.
Geocaching While Black 