Saturday, I took another drive out to Lampasas. A bunch of other cachers decided to go out and grab some of the more than a hundred caches we’ve placed out there. I, on the other hand, didn’t go out until later in the day. While caching was, as always, the primary goal, our secondary aim was a local Event being put on by Lampasas cacher Adventurekid82. One of the reasons we placed caches out there, besides giving Adventurekid82 more stuff to find, was to hopefully kick-start more caching action in the area. Well, it worked because we started seeing new handles showing up on caches. Hence, this Event was intended to hopefully draw some of the new folks out. It didn’t fail.
About twenty people showed up, most of us from the Austin area, but we also got a smattering of new, local people. That was the true goal, and our mission was accomplished! We ate Mexican food and related stories and advice to the new faces while some of the old faces discussed how we were thinking about doing something similar in a new area (I believe both Gonzales and La Grange are possibilities, but we shall see).
Sunday involved a much shorter drive. A handful of FTFs dropped in the morning, and I was especially interested in them since I hadn’t gotten an FTF yet in August. It’s not a huge deal for me, but I have gotten at least one every month since February 2020, so I like to keep the tradition going. Most of these were evil hides, which I could tell because they had “evil” in their names. Of the two remaining, one had been found before I even noticed it, leaving one option. I decided to wait until later in the day to go get it because I would already be breaking one of my cardinal caching rules: never get a cache at a church on a Sunday. Late afternoon, I drove southwest in the direction of Johnson City but got nowhere near it. I turned into the empty parking lot of a megachurch, passing its amphitheater and disc golf course. I briefly pondered the theological ramifications of the building containing a pro shop before coming to a halt at the back near the walking paths. This is when things began to go off the rails, so to speak. There were no real maps of the trails, so I couldn’t tell which one to take, and the shortest distance to the cache would involve a three-hundred-foot bushwhack that belied the cache’s T2 rating. The obvious footpath didn’t seem to lead where I needed to go, so I chose a farther, older road to get into the wooded area. I chose well, finding a short way into footpaths that wound through the trees. Once I got to GZ, something was wrong. For a T2 cache, the woods seemed thicker than expected. But I searched. And I searched some more. There was no joy. So, I considered a most important possibility: the cache was the first placed by this cacher, and, not to put too fine a point on it, first caches tend to be terrible. Perhaps the Difficulty was not actually 2, the Terrain was not actually 2, or the cache size was not, in fact, large. I widened my search area. I found a few areas that were more of a T2, and, in one of them, about fifty feet from GZ, I found a stump with a jar at the foot of it. Bad coordinates. That was the ticket. But I found my quarry, and victory requires no explanation.
Geocaching While Black 