Dramatis Personae

On Saturday, my daily cache was an Event, a semiannual gathering held at each equinox. A bunch of us conversed together regarding our lives, our travels, and our histories. Some faces we hadn’t seen in a long time were there, which was nice. I was especially nostalgic since they were the COs behind both my first Event and my first FTF. We even managed to wrangle ourselves for a group photo, kindly taken by a muggle spouse. This means you have a rare photo of me with our assemblage (and my spare tire that seems to bulge out when I sit down, but that’s a different issue altogether). But, oddly enough, this is all secondary to this entry.

As you all know, unless something truly tragic happens, I’m going to be on the road again tomorrow. The last time I traveled with another cacher (I’ve made a few of my trips with muggles but tend to obfuscate their involvement because they’re muggles), I was a few entries in before I realized that he might factor into my telling and photography and that I should probably introduce him before people started asking who that random dude was. On this trip, I will be traveling with five other cachers, so I decided to introduce them all before I started randomly talking about people.

Three of my traveling companions attended the Event, so it was a good time to get them all together. Those of you who have been reading this for a while may recognize friend of the site Razorbackgirl. Besides having appeared in these pages many times, she is the impetus for this entire trip. I had mentioned a few times that I wanted to do all of Connecticut after the changeover from counties to councils of government happened (yes, I know the state actually did it in 1960, but the Census Department only just recognized it, so don’t @ me, y’all), and she mentioned she was only six counties away from finishing Maryland. A plan fermented into looking at road maps and distilled into buying plane tickets. And here we are! Packed and counting down to our flights! In the middle is Godot, an all-around caching guru. Of all of us, he has far and away the most caches at over thirty thousand. He is also the only other dude on this trip. He and I will share a lot of rooms together, considering all these folks insist on sleeping and being comfortable at night (where’s your hard-driving caching spirit, folks?). On the right is Krissy4884. She is the newest cacher among us, a position perennially, now formerly, held by your humble narrator. She has also put up some impressive stats in the time we’ve been rolling together, featuring in my adventures more than I had previously realized. She, like me, has never been to the big cities of the East Coast (mostly—I have been to Boston), so when she heard about this, she was in like the proverbial Flynn.

The final two members of our fellowship were only with us in spirit. Kittydcota was on the way back from a cruise to Alaska. Undoubtedly, she is the best prepared of us, having just gotten off one trip and rolling into another. The last member, perched between Krissy4884 and my younger daughter, is 4everlyn. Admittedly, traveling up from San Antonio for an Event might be a bit of an inconvenience for her, but she has been a longtime member of the Texas caching community and, along with several of us, a member of the Scorpion Expeditionary Force. She will have cached in every US state except Alaska by the end of our trip. And, in one final and slightly ironic turn of events, the outside flankers in the same photo, husband and wife The Outlaw and Moosiegirl, might also connect up with us for a bit on the road. They just found out that they have to go to Massachusetts for a visit, so our paths might cross.

And those are our players as the journey gets underway. And it will all begin (auspiciously, I hope) with our touch down in…