Five Thousand, Two Hundred And Eighty Feet of Rock

I feel it is time to offer you all one of my greatest, most closely guarded secrets. I didn’t start writing all this so that I could document every county in the United States. I started writing this so that I could make terrible, pun-like jokes to a captive audience!

So, assuming nothing goes wrong, today will be a milestone for me. When I get my daily cache, it will be cache number seven thousand. Go me! Obviously, I can’t be sure which cache I will claim today, but I’m hoping it’s one of some importance, perhaps one with special meaning or one with a lot of favorites. That’s going to take some further thought, though. While I haven’t gotten every cache in Travis or Williamson Counties by any stretch of the imagination, I have gotten most of the simple ones and pretty much all the significant ones. The funny thing is that I never really think about caches for milestones. They’ve usually just happened. My fiftieth cache was also my first FTF. My two hundredth was the first cache I ever favorited. Seven hundred was Piedras Negras, eight hundred my first cache in a US state outside of Texas, nine hundred GeoWoodstock XVII. OK, I will admit that some planning went into getting number two thousand at Mingo or five thousand at Headquarters, but usually they just happen. Of course, I don’t feel the desire to broadcast my own milestones for the most part. If I wasn’t writing about the things I was doing, I doubt I would even mention them. I have to admit that often they don’t feel special or noteworthy, even though I know that I’ve done more than many with more finds and longer time in “the life.” I went to a friend’s Event celebrating his hitting thirty thousand caches and offhandedly mentioned that logging the Event put me at the fifth year of my streak. All of a sudden, it became about him and me at his thing. I don’t like doing that. I also don’t like holding Events to trumpet my accomplishments, even though I’m happy to laud the accomplishments of others.

I guess the real takeaway from all this (other than the fact that I’m a complicated dude) is that there’s no reason not to celebrate, so I guess I oughta go find a noisemaker. Or some kind of crap like that.