Last week, Razorbackgirl reached out to me, suggesting a trip down to Houston. We both have good reasons to hit the area. I’m still working on I’ve Been Everywhere, and a couple of the towns I need are part of the greater Houston metroplex, and she’s closing in on fifteen thousand finds before a planned Event celebrating that feat. 4everlyn and another friend of ours from San Antonio would be joining us, and it sounded like a good time, so I was in! We set out early Saturday morning and met at the appointed time and place. Unfortunately, our fourth was ill and unable to make it, so it was a minireunion of the TexaSix, a Texas Three, if you will. We had two primary objectives. The first was to pick up a bunch of Adventure Labs in the area. There’s little that will get you out and around like them. The second changed during the planning stages. The original thought was to work on a Geoart just south of the city but still in the metro area. But we decided to move our gaze just to the east and work on the Baytown GeoTour. We, of course, had a tertiary goal of picking up challenges wherever we might encounter them. Some snack acquisition and a little shuffling into one vehicle later, we were off!
The morning began with Labs at a series of restaurants. While they were supposed to highlight the tastes of the town, I was severely disappointed in the locations. They were all places you could find anywhere. The later Taco Tour was more about homegrown places, but we were jaded. As a Texan, I feel the best tacos are from tiny food trucks in either San Antonio or the Rio Grande Valley (though I must also point out that Austin has the best nontraditional tacos). The Labs began to give way to the GeoTour physical caches. We quickly decided to head out to the more outlying ones and work our way back into the urban areas, where our target caches were denser. Luckily for us, there was a little bit of overlap. A good handful of GeoTour locations had something Lab-worthy, frequently giving us two finds for the price of one stop.
We saw some of the best that Baytown has to offer—parks, libraries, art, and some stunning views out over the ship channels and the Gulf of Mexico.
A local vineyard turned out to be home to the only cache I gave one of my stingily hoarded favorite points. Even I can admit and laud when I see something that took effort to create and will to maintain. A different cache involved us phoning a friend who had found it a month before. Sometimes, you need something like that when you’re trying to find something magnetic on a piece of big iron, especially a pumpjack. Even after he gave us relatively detailed information, we still had trouble finding it until Razorbackgirl unraveled it. It was right where our friend described, but you can’t find it unless you feel for it in a place that doesn’t seem to have a cavity if you’re not in the right spot and isn’t visible unless you’re looking through a certain gap on the other side of the jack.
It’s not obvious, but the CO of the GeoTour also happens to be irrationally attracted to birdhouses! We found so many of them that I stopped photographing them after a while, lest everyone think those were the only caches around! But kidding aside, his hiding skills and variety were more than enough to keep us occupied for the day. In the end, while our individual find counts varied slightly, all three of us walked away with over a hundred finds each. Sadly, we were one cache short of finishing the GeoTour. That one was magnetically attached to a bridge, possibly to the underside, and we were too tired and crabby to tackle it so late in the day. I tried it but had to fight too many mosquitoes to do it. I guess I’ll just have to go back and try it on a cool morning when I’m more limber and prepared to squat like a troll for an hour or more. Since it’s already April, the cool morning might be the hardest of those to find until winter. We were still happy with our accomplishments for the day.
We chased it all down with seafood for dinner before 4everlyn headed to her hotel (she was staying the night to do more caching on Sunday) and Razorbackgirl and I drove back home, delayed only by whatever idiot restricted I-10 to one lane, causing a backup for miles. But we made it back to our respective homes and beds. And be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home. Or some kind of crap like that.
Geocaching While Black 