The Lengths I Will Go To

So, I recently had a chat with some friends regarding the most current incarnation of the Wheel of Challenges, Iconic Cacher. We all have a couple of the same complications: there haven’t been a ton of Events around here lately, and some of us have claimed all of some of the cache types in the area. A couple of Events are being hosted in Austin so that people will have the opportunity without going to the far reaches like San Antonio or Lampasas. Yours truly is even slipping one under the wire. That will not be a major worry. However, I have also managed to find pretty much every Virtual in Central Texas already. The closest ones I don’t already have are in San Marcos and Bastrop. A trip wasn’t on the agenda for the weekend, though, because the girls were coming to visit, and we already had other plans. That did not, however, stop us from making a nighttime foray for a relatively simple Multi-cache. The redirector was a little damaged, but we found it, and the younger, non-cacher daughter was the one who spotted the cache. We also popped over to a popular Traditional that I had previously found so the older, caching daughter could find it. The younger daughter also figured that one out first, prompting me to ask why she didn’t have her own account already. That is a question we shall ponder at a later date.

I had to take them back to their mother, and once that mission had been accomplished, I decided to take a detour on the way back home for a Virtual. I took a different route and ended up in Bryan/College Station. As always, I was a pilgrim in an unholy land. But in the land of the infidels, I found a Virtual I had never seen before at a park that was once the homestead of a founder of the city. The gazebo inside had displays of the original cabin and some of the artifacts unearthed during archaeological digs. Richard Carter, his wife, and several family members were buried there, but it was also noted that many of the people they enslaved were buried in unmarked graves around them. I could only think of Stephen Jay Gould‘s words. I was, somehow, less interested in the lives and accomplishments of the Carters than in the near certainty that people of equal talent had lived and died in their fields. I logged the Virtual, and my goal was achieved. But I was already in Brazos County, so I went ahead and grabbed another cache, this time a Letterbox Hybrid.

Normally, I don’t get involved with a cache at a church on a Sunday, but it was late in the day, and nobody was around, so I said why not and went for it. I had to give it kudos. I parked the car about three feet in front of it, and it still took me quite a while to find it. When I did, I opened the lock, confident I had found a cache different from any other I had ever seen. For that, I gave it one of my stingily hoarded favorite points. With my second quarry found, I headed back to Austin, knowing that I had almost completed the quest for the latest souvenirs. I was only three types short: an Event, some of which were coming up; an EarthCache, a few of which I had saved around town for just such a possibility; and a Mystery, a bunch of which I had Challenges completed and unlogged. This newest victory would soon be mine!