Key Performance Indicators

Saturday morning began early. The girls and I loaded into the car, aiming for old counties and new caches. The plan was to visit six counties and get a Traditional and a Non-Traditional in each one. I had done minimal planning for it but downloaded maps with caches the night before. I’d kind of done this before with little planning in the beginning, so how could we fail?

We began in Burnet County, walking through the same cemetery I visited all those years ago for my first Multi-cache. We looked for a different one, this one Star Trek themed. We paced from one end of the field to the other until we eventually found a matchstick case in the bark of a tree. Being the sentimental sort that I am, I had to memorialize it. Trite …

… but I’m such a softie. After grabbing a Traditional from an LPC, we went to Llano. Another quick Traditional was followed by a Virtual at a special location …

… one of two houses used for filming one of the most famous horror films ever made, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It also required visiting its twin in Georgetown, but that would have to wait until Sunday (yes, we made it out there). We shot off again for a special one for me. Not having to visit courthouses has made these travels a lot easier, so believe me, I’ve been cutting county corners ’til they’re round. But I had to go to the center of Mason County.

Three years after its tragedy, I parked outside the restored Mason County Courthouse. Luckily, a Traditional was right across the street, a nano on a bench, easy enough to pluck and sign. A Non-Traditional would be a little harder to come by, but not incredibly so. There was an Adventure Lab bonus cache near the courthouse, so we went around town working on its Lab series until we got the corrected coordinates. A different nano on a different bench in view of the courthouse awaited us. After the worst visit to a “fast” food place ever (fifty-five minutes from pulling in to leaving with food), we left town doing some impromptu karaoke (this, if you must know). McCulloch County seemed like it would be easy, having a Traditional less than a mile from an EarthCache. The Traditional was easy—a bison on a fence across from the original site of a long-gone presidio. The EarthCache wasn’t. It required tools and simple equipment that we didn’t have with us because when do you need tools for an EarthCache? Unfortunately, I can’t eyeball millimeter measurements, so our hope for a quick nip into and out of the county was dashed. However, we chose another option, which led to a stretch goal. On the other side of the county was …

… the Geographical Center of Texas. Well, sort of. Unlike in Kansas, the actual center is on private property, but this is certainly close enough for (state) government work. Just down the road was a park, and we stopped there for a Mystery and a heck of a view deep in the heart of Texas. I was a little disappointed, though. This park will be the location of the physical container for the Texas Two Step Challenge. It’s going to drop on August 17th at an Event at the park. The girls won’t be able to attend. It sure would have been a good time for us to sign it together.

This also meant we were a stone’s throw away from Brown County. It was not on our original plan for the day, but a quick Traditional and Letterbox just across the border were more than enough for our purposes. We turned east toward our next destination and noticed something else: our route would take us through Mills County, another county not on our agenda, but if we were already going to be there, why not? The Traditional was easy enough to find, a camo spice jar at the junction of two county roads. I pulled off onto a dirt road to find a Multi at a nearby cemetery.

The name caught my attention because I thought it might be a cemetery for a long-gone Black community and because it was called the Buffalo-Ebony Cemetery, which was odd because I’ve been to and through Buffalo tons of times, and it’s in Leon County. Turned out that this community was once called Buffalo, but the post office rejected the name (probably because of the Buffalo I know so well). So they chose the name Ebony, the first name of a local cowboy resident, and went on as such until the community died out. Either way, once we adjusted coordinates, our Multi turned out to be a cap-and-cap in a tree. From there, we continued on to our next destination (and only real failure), San Saba County.

The thing about San Saba is that there are only three Non-Traditionals in the county: two EarthCaches and a Mystery Cache. The Mystery is a challenge cache that requires finding one of the other two Non-Traditionals, so that left us with two options for our purposes. The first EarthCache was on the other side of the county from us, easily reachable if we hadn’t crossed McCulloch County. That left the other EarthCache at a set of falls. I didn’t do any preliminary research on the location and failed a wisdom check, so I was surprised to find it was in a state park. After looking at a map of the park, we realized that the EarthCache I thought we could drive within a couple hundred feet of actually required a mile-and-a-half hike because the drivable road was closed off except for emergencies. It was late in the day, and we had already driven a couple hundred miles and were neither prepared nor in the mood for that hike. So, we turned around and went back the way we came. At least we had a Traditional for the county, right? Wrong. I wasn’t paying enough attention, and the Traditional I thought we had gotten in the county was actually in Mills County instead. I totally failed my navigation checks for the county as well.

Finally, we came to our final county of the day, Lampasas County. Finding some here would be easy since some friends and I placed a bunch here a couple of years ago. A quick cemetery cache took care of the Traditional, though a muggle disturbed us, asking if we needed help. I told him a convenient lie (that we like to photograph old cemeteries) and it gave my caching daughter her first experience of a muggle getting in our business. For a Non-Traditional, we decided to hit an EarthCache in a local park that was placed during our Great Placing back then. We read about the springs, their formation, and how they differ from hot springs. I also could barely smell the sulfur from the water because I don’t have the strongest sense of smell. But that wasn’t important. We answered the questions, sent them off, and once logging was completed, headed back home. We got back about two hours after we expected, one hour of which was stolen by Dairy Queen.

We planned to get six counties, and we got seven, two of which were unplanned. We totally failed one of them by every metric, but we can return there on the way somewhere else. We ate terrible food, we sang silly songs, we photographed landscapes. It was a good day.