Two And Two Together

Bear with me, folks.  This one is going to be a bit more of a wander than usual.

I think that anyone who has gone beyond a certain number of caches or, especially, Fizzy Loops has run into a certain issue: somewhere along the way, a CO decided to change the Difficulty or Terrain on one of their caches, throwing your grid into confusion and losing you a loop (or, on a rare occasion, gaining you one). I have had that experience myself, and it’s a little disheartening, even if you don’t particularly care about Fizzies as a metric. If you do care, it could cause a borderline state of apoplexy. I’m sure once you get into the rarified air that comes with having lots of loops, you might not even notice. If you have very few or only one loop, it could be a big deal.

The Battleship Texas, the world’s last World War I era dreadnought, has been the location of an old and highly favorited Virtual, my official cache for Harris County.  She has also been recently moved from her longtime berth in the Houston Ship Channel near the San Jacinto Battleground to a Galveston dry dock for repairs.  From there her future is uncertain. While several places have been suggested (Galveston, Beaumont, Corpus Christi), but none have been cemented as her new home.  Though there are tours of the Texas available while she’s in dry dock, the Virtual has been temporarily disabled.  As the repairs are expected to take months, possibly years, it’s going to be a very long-term disable, but that’s not important for my purposes right now.

I have talked with a lot of county cachers over the years, and if there’s one universal piece of wisdom they all share, it’s to find two caches in every county to ensure that at least one is good.  It’s a piece of wisdom that I often ignore.  It’s good thinking, don’t get me wrong, but most people going for a county tend to skirt the edge, dip in just enough for a find, and then go on to the next county.  Finding two caches ensures you don’t accidentally miss a county because you were wrong about a county line.  That’s not usually a problem for me since I go to each courthouse and, therefore, am well within a county when I make a find.  That has served me well for 774 out of 775 counties (San Diego famously withstanding).   

As mentioned previously, I’ve spent time considering the ramifications of losing a loop because of a changing D/T. But (though it is not an issue for me because I have returned to Harris County a few times) I had never until Monday even entertained the notion of losing an entire county because the cache itself had moved!