First To Find, Fool!

My daughters like to think they look hard-core and frightening. I love them very much, but they do not. Not to me, anyway…

A couple of days ago, a couple of caches appeared near downtown Austin. One of them was close to a major thoroughfare, the other deeper in East Austin, a more economically depressed but steadily gentrifying part of town. I talked to my older daughter and asked her if she was interested in getting an FTF. She was because she hadn’t found one yet (being something of a stats person, I already knew that). Her sister was bored and looking for something to do, even if that meant venturing out into the unrelenting heat. I picked the one in East Austin, figuring that someone would snag the one closer in (which still hasn’t happened yet, but whatever). We went out, got some dinner and then set off after our quarry once the sun was a little lower in the sky.

They have never paid attention when I was driving, so unless it’s somewhere we frequent, they never know where we are. However, this time they recognized a little bit on the way. I grew up not far from GZ, so I’ve made an effort to point some places and things out, and apparently, some of the things I said stuck with them. When we hit GZ, however, we were in a vacant lot that I didn’t remember being there. There was no sign of anything recent, so it could have been that way for any length of time, but that wasn’t important.

We hopped out of the car, and the younger daughter (the muggle, no less) was on the cache, a film canister jammed in the bottom of a telephone cable cover, in a heartbeat. She struggled a bit to get the canister out, but she managed, and then handed it to her sister, who was the first person to put ink on the log. I followed and then moved to replace it, but they first insisted on making a scary, unhinged, “crazy” photograph with it. They are hardly gangsters doing gangster stuff, but I let them have their fantasy. With that, we logged our co-FTF, her first. We quickly returned home to enjoy air conditioning, pie, and, at the request of the younger daughter, some anime. Victory was ours!