Dear Google Maps…

…you kinda BLANKed me.

So, after taking my poll, doing some soul-searching, and polishing up a good rationalization regarding my least favorite city in Texas, I have decided to work the I’ve Been Everywhere Challenge. Of the ninety-one locations I needed to go, I had thirty-three left. There were also a few in my local region, so I decided to take an afternoon off before the holidays were over to hit the locations close to home. I drove out to Gillespie County but chose an alternate route to get there to see some roads I had never been on before. My choice was rewarded.

Passing through Blanco, the former seat of Blanco County, I came across an old courthouse! You bet I took a five-minute detour to check it out! I had previously wondered why Blanco was not the seat of the county it shares a name with. Turns out that a county vote heavily influenced by the Johnson Family moved it, leaving behind a barely used courthouse. It’s now home to offices and the county historical museum, and they rent the top floor out for functions. It crossed my mind to maybe have an Event here, but I doubt it would be inexpensive enough to justify the cost. That wasn’t the important thing, anyway.

While I normally tend toward appropriate musical interludes when approaching a town, I let the obvious one go here. But the song is right about one thing: ain’t nobody feelin’ no pain because there’s not much out there to cause it. Well, not much except Hondo’s Place. To the sounds of the weekly guitar open mic, I zeroed in on a Virtual out there and logged it after completing its request. I spent another few minutes looking around the liveliest ghost town I’d ever been in and then got back to the road, one location closer to finishing that challenge.

Since another location was forty-five minutes away, I figured I might as well take care of that one while I was out there. I drove to Bulverde, near San Antonio. I got a cache, but much like all those years ago in Duval County, I later learned I had been led astray. According to the challenge, I had to find a cache within four miles of the center of Bulverde. The caching apps have the correct location of Bulverde. Google Maps, on the other hand, routes to some shopping areas on the edge of town instead of the center. I got out, found a Letterbox Hybrid tethered inside an oak hollow, and left—not realizing until after I got home that it was about five miles from the actual center of town! So now I have to go back! While I will accept 25 percent of the blame for being complacent, I assign 75 percent to Google for making such an egregious and lazy mistake! While it has rarely routed me wrong, it cost me this time. It’s only an hour and change plus some gas, but it’s still another trip I have to make that I shouldn’t have to make again.

But since I was down there anyway, I finished things off at an Event in New Braunfels. There were a couple of attendees from Iowa (of all places), but the rest were locals, only one of whom (the host) I had ever met before. I rarely wear my nametag these days because when I go to Events around home, people usually know who I am. Therefore, I was woefully unprepared, but they didn’t seem to mind. We talked and laughed and shoved tacos in our faces. So I guess, in the grand scheme of things, two out of three ain’t bad.