To The Edge And Beyond

Saturday morning, the girls and I mounted up and headed west, my caching daughter in the front seat and my muggle daughter in the back. We have a lot of counties to get if my daughter is going to complete the Texas County Challenge and Texas Two Step. Since they live in Longview, we’re making a point of going on trips around the region so we can at least take care of Northeast and East Texas. Eventually, we’ll have to go to the Panhandle and the West, but this is a start. The evening before, we had been a little surprised to find that Gregg County was only half done because she had never gotten a Non-Traditional, so we went and got one, the bonus to an Adventure Lab series that they had helped me with. But Saturday would be new stuff for us.

We began at the very edge of Upshur County. This is where I learned that I have an annoying habit of referring to a county by the name of its seat, but that’s not important. We found a quick Traditional but opted to wait on a Non-Traditional. Most of them were on the other side of the county, and the two nearby were convoluted cemetery caches that required far too many legs to complete for our purposes. We decided to either hit one of the (theoretically) easier ones on the way somewhere else or come back for one of the close but fiddly ones when we had time on our hands. We bypassed an unexpected finger of Smith County and stopped in Wood County. We only needed a Non-Traditional but ended up DNFing a many-legged Multi in a cemetery, opting to return another day as Apollo was beginning to get surly. We shot off again, bound for one of the jewels of the trip.

We slowed down in Grand Saline in Van Zandt County, home of a salt dome and factory that is the source of some of the purest salt in the country and the EarthCache that focuses on it. Despite the cacher’s reluctance to answer questions that had no definitive answer, we managed to come up with appropriate answers and log the cache. Then we returned to town for an extra Non-Traditional at the town’s fabled Salt Palace. Honestly, it was not as impressive as I had hoped. You expect something called a “palace” to be grander in scale. That said, it was the kind of interesting attraction one might expect if one knows anything about Americana, worthy even of Route 66 (were it even remotely near it). Unfortunately, the information we started with was faulty, so we arrived before they opened. But yes …

… we did lick the building. After finding a quick Traditional on a train caboose (which, luckily, didn’t turn out as annoying as I feared; I hate train car caches), we were off again for Rains County. We found a Traditional on the way into Emory, and a simple Multi-cache at the county courthouse met our needs.

We were a little disappointed that a nearby, semidilapidated phone booth was not home to the cache, but we’re just tourists and have no say in such matters. It’s enough that a cache was even there.

We had only intended to skirt the edge of Hunt County, but since it was approaching lunchtime, we continued on to the edge of Greenville. After burgers, we found a blessedly simple cemetery Multi (though the final turned out to be extremely off GZ) and a Traditional at a horse training facility. From there, we continued to Rockwall, where we found a Traditional in the parking lot of a liquor store, earning a raised eyebrow from me, and an EarthCache that taught us about the rock walls that earned the county its name. I had to cajole my daughter into it a little. With the first day of school approaching, she wanted to avoid thinking about science as much as possible, but she ultimately decided she wanted to help our cute alien friends more. Once the cache was logged, we had reached the furthest extent of our planned travels, but I put a query to the party (which was actually just the cacher as the muggle was enjoying a post-lunch nap).

I had included several possible stretch goals in the day, and we were at one of them. She still needed a Non-Traditional in Dallas County, and we were only a mile away from a Virtual just across the border. We didn’t have to go, but if we did, we’d never have to go back to Dallas County. She has developed her own disdain for Dallas independent of me, one nowhere near as strong as my own, but she had no qualms about popping in and popping out. So we drove across a bridge into the soulless suburban city of Rowlett.

The Virtual was an artistic monument to a tornado that had passed through in 2015. Despite my disdain for the soulless suburb, I could still appreciate its pain. For all my talk, I wouldn’t wish that tragedy on anyone. I could also appreciate the stylized angel they had chosen to memorialize it. We counted all the appropriate things, sent off the information, and logged it. As quickly as we had come, we shot off over another bridge, bound for Kaufman County.

We had long since gotten a Traditional there, so we just needed the Non-Traditional. We got it in the form of a Mystery from the Discover Terrell GeoTour. Maybe one of these days, we’ll return and get the rest of them. There are only fifteen caches in total. I’d be more than happy to add another GeoTour to my list!

Our final move was a return to Smith County. I was amazed that my caching daughter had never gotten any caches in Tyler, but I remembered that she had found ones with me before she officially started. We picked up an easy Traditional in a cemetery on the way into town and then a quick Virtual in another cemetery in the town proper. Two other stretch goals were possible, but it was collectively decided (with no sleep-based abstentions) to call it a day and head back to L-Town.

Overall, we did good. We completed seven counties, got half of a new one, and had only one cache failure. From a certain point of view, we could have done more. I certainly did when I was doing the Texas County Challenge myself. On the other hand, I didn’t have to get two caches per county for the Two Step back then, which would have definitely slowed me down. I’m feeling confident about the future of our collective project, but that was nowhere near as important as going to the grocery store, getting the junkiest food ever, and eating together to celebrate our day!