The 22nd Annual Texas Challenge and Festival

We all gathered in our colors early on Saturday morning: myself, my daughters, and a whole bunch of cachers from all over. We had come to face each other, intent on bringing the Golden Ammo Can home to our own personal regions. This year involved a few changes on many levels of the competition. On a personal level, I was not the team captain as I have been in years past. I realized a while back that I could not be a good steward of my children and a good captain at the same time. Since they would be competing with me (well, officially one of them, the other was an extra set of eyes), others took up that duty.

On a team level, we were bigger than normal because Team CenTex merged with the South team this year, resulting in Team South Central, presenting in safety orange. On an organizational level, the competition would run for three hours instead of the traditional four hours. This was part of a multipronged attempt to have scoring done at a more reasonable hour. In years past, scoring would run far into the night though the team competition would end at noon.

The competition began with a stupid human trick: captains attempting to throw marshmallows into a teammate’s open mouth. When the teammate had caught the appropriate number of marshmallows, the captain received coordinates and puzzles. They were disseminated appropriately and then, when the doors were opened, we were off!

The girls and I immediately rushed to complete the activity caches. We raced around one course making jet sounds, and another on tiny bikes. At a local museum, we had to draw fast sketches and then identify information from the various artworks scattered around the grounds. Finally, at a local park, we had to handle scales, both musical and measurement. After that, we got to the real nitty gritty.

The girls and I hit the road, going from location to location, finding the hidden punches for our scorecards. Sometimes, we would encounter foul and most foreign members of other teams. Though our hatred of them burned with the heat of a thousand suns, we nevertheless watched out for each other. Nobody made it any easier for enemy teams, though. I have to admit that I found myself at a minor disadvantage. Since the girls and I were traveling together, I had to serve triple duty as driver, navigator, and comms. It no doubt slowed us down, though probably not significantly enough to affect the greater outcome. I (euphemistically) ran into the North captain, and he told us that his car had gotten around seventy caches at that point when we were nowhere close! We ran into a tendril of the Southeast team. Thanks to a dedicated driver, they were able to hit long strings of caches in a wooded area without having to go back because the vehicle could await them at the end. At one point, several cars from multiple teams converged with us at the same cache. Minor trash-talking ensued! Still later, our puzzle gurus cracked the locations of some of the puzzle caches. Our car was able to get FTF bonuses for two of them and another vehicle on our team got a third! We were running and gunning as best as we could!

But time catches up to us all. As the deadline approached, we headed back toward the hall. There was a little time to grab a couple more nearby, but with ten minutes left, there was nothing left but to turn in our scorecards and take a well-deserved break. As cachers returned from the field, we who were “vicious” and “eternal” enemies before became fast friends again for another year. And, as we all talked about the caches we did and didn’t find and the difficulty of the puzzles …

… we got a chance to meet a special guest! WanderingVenser came all the way down from HQ to see the festivities! We had actually run into one another when I was there previously, but I had forgotten because, quite honestly, I was pretty overwhelmed by it all at the time. We talked a little about stuff and things, and he was kind enough to take a message back to a couple of other Lackeys back in Seattle, but I kept it short. There were a lot of other people who wanted to meet him, and the girls were feeling a little worn out. We headed back to the hotel for lunch and naps all around. We had other things to do later in the day, such as attend…