An Old Checkbox

Yesterday morning, I took a drive out to Bell County. It was my chance to put a nail in an old caching coffin I’d been carrying around for longer than I ever thought I would. Over five years ago, I signed a challenge. It was simple enough: find a hundred caches in each month of the year (they don’t have to be consecutive or anything) and a hundred on each date. A hundred in each month was easy enough. A hundred on each date, however, turned out to be a bit more daunting. It didn’t help that the challenge required 3,100 caches to complete (the hundred on each date), but I figured as time went on, I’d accomplish it, possibly in a couple of years. Over 8,800 caches later, that challenge still sat taunting me. I noticed last week that I was close. I needed two caches on Thursday, and that was easy enough to pop out and do. All that remained was getting five caches on Sunday, and I would finally be done with it. I woke up early to do my work while it was still cool and headed north to get out of my regular hunting grounds.

I decided to start in the town of Salado. Earlier this year, I was gifted solutions to a Geoart in the area, and I decided to go grab some of them. I made four attempts but ran into two problems. The first was that all four of them were at churches and I have a standing rule against finding caches near churches on a Sunday. I bent that rule and gave passable searches for a couple of them (one long before any services, the other on the far end of a property away from the building itself). I knew that they had been placed by a former local cacher who was renowned for his incredibly difficult hides, and later consultation with a previous finder confirmed what I quickly realized: many of these hides were a pain in the butt (excuse my French). I eventually decided that I didn’t want to look for DNA tubes in stupid places that hadn’t been touched by the hands of man (or woman or however you identify—I don’t mean to be gender assumptive) in one or two years. Besides, the entire point of getting up there that early was to be in the morning cool, and difficult searches would burn that up rather quickly (or slowly, depending on how you look at it). So I redeployed to nearby Belton, to another Geoart overlaid on the town. I didn’t have all the answers, but they at least had waypoints leading to the physical portions. At first, I feared I might have similar problems here as in Salado. I rolled up to the first one to find a bunch of muggles doing a fitness class right on top of it! Luckily, there were lots of other options.

A couple of hours later (and after some aborted attempts that I just didn’t feel like fiddling with at that moment), I had a plethora of caches of multiple types. My work was done, so I headed back home, arriving in time for lunch.

This morning, after performing my morning constitutionals, I logged my cache for the day: the Every Day/Every Month Cacher Challenge, which was, until yesterday, my oldest uncompleted challenge. That’s one more in the rearview mirror!