Yesterday, I decided to take a jaunt up to the Waco area. I have a list of small towns to visit now, and two of them are located nearby. This time, unlike in Bulverde, I had studied maps and had a good idea of which caches would be good and which ones would be too far. The first town, Lorena, was tangentially familiar in that I’d passed through it countless times on the way to East Texas. It was easy enough to jump off the highway onto a side road and find the cache. I took a minute to look through the log. This micro was placed by an early local cacher known for both his plentiful hides and his temper regarding other cachers harming or maintaining his hides. It’s been five years since he last logged in, so who knows where he might be; but thanks to him, I was able to thumb through the ghosts of signatures past—stretching back to 2008—some I knew, others unfamiliar. I added my own signature to those that came before. There is a county caching idea that when you go to a new county for a cache, you should always find a second cache just in case one turns out to be outside the limits. Truth be told, I’ve never really concerned myself with that advice because, thanks to my penchant for visiting courthouses, I’m usually well within a county’s borders. In over eight hundred counties, it’s only failed me once. But after Bulverde, I decided to take that advice to heart. Why not grab an extra just to be sure I was good for Lorena? Normally, that would be a rhetorical question, but in this instance, it was because the cache was missing. This one was hidden by the same, no longer seen, cacher. I found a magnet on a guard rail, but no container. Considering it had a year of DNFs and one dubious find, I went ahead and marked it for archival.
The second town was Valley Mills, west of Waco. The good part was that there were tons of caches running through town. The bad news was that they were part of a notorious power trail, the Brazos River Adventure Trail. I tried the simplest one since it was well into town. That turned up a big fat negative. Didn’t DNF it, though. I don’t know if it was missing or I just didn’t find it. (I think it was the latter). So I opted for a simple Multi-cache at an old train station. That also came with a complication. I found the appropriate redirectors and got corrected coordinates and the cache page was kind enough to come with a checker to make sure you got the right numbers. Unfortunately, none of the possible combinations worked. Luckily, there weren’t that many possibilities, so I chose to brute force the problem. There were only four places around town it could be, so I looked at all the possible waypoints on the map. The hint mentioned it was on a cemetery fence, and only one waypoint was in a cemetery, so that narrowed things down a bit. I went to the cemetery, drove to the back and found my quarry along the fence as promised.
With that, my excursion was complete. I began the southward trek for home, having reached two new towns with twenty-nine towns remaining. Of course, there are a few more towns I can take a day and go to; but soon, I’m going to have to start planning like in days of old if I want to get this challenge done.
Geocaching While Black 