The original plan for the weekend was for the girls to come down from L-Town to Austin and go hiking, working on Carrot Killer‘s newly created D5/T5 Virtual. Rain would have ruined the plan had it occurred that way. Instead, in an unexpected twist of circumstance, I ended up having to drive up there. It was still raining up there, but nowhere near as much. However, the intermittently recurring precipitation, sometimes rain, sometimes merely drizzle, left an ever-present layer of dirt and moisture on everything exposed to the outdoors. There was a film on everything we touched. This is why I carry baby wipes with me, and they were very useful this time.
The girls and I grabbed breakfast and set off for nearby Wood County. Since I was in the area, I figured it was as good a time as any to work on some of the places I needed for I’ve Been Everywhere. I also noted the irony that they had been there with me before. We drove over to Winnsboro in the far north part of the county. I also needed to visit another town north of there, close to the Oklahoma border, but we decided to leave it for another day. The weather, the distance, and the errands planned for later made it unattractive. Besides, it would make for a good excuse to pop over that border at a later date. Once in Winnsboro, it was easy to find a quick Traditional, a magnetic key box on a sign for an abandoned barbeque restaurant.
The younger daughter, being the climber, wasn’t especially interested because (a) everything was damp, (b) she was tired, and, most importantly, (c) there was nothing to climb. Therefore, she remained on perpetual car duty (which really meant book-reading duty) while her sister, the cacher, and I popped the lid off the cache. I let her take the lead on things. She’s interested in doing more caching on her own, so she needs a little more experience finding them. I was only the driver. She did all the hard work; I just stood around and looked pretty. Once Winnsboro was conquered, we all set off again for Pine Mills. It was less a town and more a country crossroads. We stopped on the side of one of those roads and repeated the same dynamic, the younger daughter reading in the back seat as the older daughter and I popped just into the tree line for a hanging bottle.
While preparing for our next move, I noticed something on the map. A pair of new caches had popped up in nearby Quitman. The possibility of an FTF in a new county perked up our ears, so we shot over there, taking a moment to visit an old friend in the process. We decided to get only one cache, which was fine by me. I can speak only for myself, but I don’t feel the need to get every FTF (just one in every county in the United States, he said with a devilish gleam in his eye [and, just so you know, that’s a joke]). Unfortunately, there was no joy. The first one required a short walk in the woods that would have taken us longer than I was willing to leave my younger daughter alone. We just couldn’t find the second one, even though it should have been easy enough. It happens. Despondent (not really), we set off for a third town.
Mineola was a slightly larger town than Winnsboro, with a more developed historic downtown. We stopped at the town train station and quickly realized why. Mineola is an Amtrak stop for the Texas Eagle. Usually, when I stop at a train station, it’s a museum of the storied past. As the train pulled into the station, we realized this one was quite active. Everyone was at the platform, not under the flagpoles where the cache lay in wait. My daughter lifted the pole’s skirt, pulled out the cache, and we signed it before she returned it to where it had been. With that, our official caching plans were complete. I found out later that this cache also served as a twofer. There was another town on the list I somehow managed to miss called New Hope, and the cache lay inside the radius of both towns!
But something ere the end, some work of noble note, was yet to be done. After lunch, we ran some errands in Tyler and, having some extra time on our hands, did some Adventure Labs that took us around downtown and the Smith County Courthouse. After visiting my old friend, we also visited murals and art installations. It would have been nice if there had been a bonus cache for the series, but that wasn’t important. I had a lovely time with my daughters. I was much closer to my goal. I didn’t run out of wipes. I call that victory.
Geocaching While Black 