Shakedown Cruises

Over the weekend, I took the new vehicle out for some driving and acclimation. The primary excuse was to get an idea of the gas mileage. For all the flaws of my old car, it got great mileage. The new one on paper is supposed to get similar, or possibly slightly worse, mileage, but the only way to find out was to put it through its paces and see what happened. At any other time of year, I would have gone somewhere interesting and probably a couple of hours away. This weekend, however, that would have involved planning I didn’t feel like making and early rising I didn’t feel like waking to be out in the heat I didn’t feel like baking in. Instead, I made a couple of shorter trips, one each day, to burn some fuel and get out of my regular hunting grounds. So, on Saturday, I returned to Elgin. My first cache attempt came up short, which was sad because I’ve been working on a challenge to find state names in cache titles for a long time, and I had no idea that Georgia was so close. I instead stopped in at the train depot museum and found a nano on one of its barred windows. I could have also gotten the cache in the park across the street, but did I mention the heat? I didn’t feel like searching for a probable nano on an artillery piece on a day like that (or even on other days when it’s much cooler). I logged the cache and headed back home, calling it a day.

Sunday suffered from a similar problem. I rolled out of bed late and didn’t get moving until after lunchtime. I had been bouncing around several locations in my head, settled on San Antonio, and decided to stop short in New Braunfels. Two caches were quick enough finds and more than satisfied my needs for the day. A third in a park came up a big fat DNF, though. I’m not even entirely sure that I was searching in the right tree, but based on former logs, I was quite sure what the cache was supposed to be, and I found nothing that even came close. Once I had finished those three, I decided to stop at the world’s largest convenience store and plan my next move. That plan was discarded once I realized an entire exit on the highway was backed up because of people with the same idea. At that moment, I decided I might as well head toward home because it wasn’t getting any cooler. My stated mission was mostly accomplished anyway. I was getting the feel of the new vehicle, and the mileage was looking similar to my old car, though the final verdict would come after more driving. And besides, I had some writing to do.