Thalassa

Saturday morning began in La Grange with the girls in tow. They were visiting Austin for the long Labor Day weekend, so we took a day to continue our project. We arrived to find thoroughly unexpected muggle activity!

Unbeknownst to us, Saturday morning was also a county fair day, so chairs full of muggles and their families lined the streets around our first ground zero for the day, a Multi-cache based at a fire department memorial. There was a moment of consternation: there were only three non-traditional caches in Fayette County, and the rest were out of the way for our plans. Of course, the good thing about crowds is that they provide anonymity. Nobody paid attention to us as we examined the fireman’s statue (shielded from the drizzle by my trusty umbrella), gleaned the important information therefrom, and then slipped away unnoticed. We were redirected to the town cemetery, passing the vanguard of the oncoming parade …

… to find the final in a shrub. We were lucky enough to have a Traditional on the other end of the cemetery: an ammo can placed by the CO in memory of their deceased grandfather. Once our work was done, we continued on to Columbus.

We stopped for a Traditional that I thought would help me on a challenge I’d been working for a while, not remembering that I had already fulfilled that specific need. But that cache and a Letterbox Hybrid were good enough for today. From there, we continued to Wharton.

Our Traditional there was a pill bottle in a tree at the back of the old cemetery of a long-defunct town. The Non-Traditional was a return to the past. A Virtual at an old motor lodge, it was one of the caches I claimed for the county five years before.

But something else in the county tweaked my nose. There’s a cache there called Drapetomania. The CO described it as a desire to wander away from home. I knew what it really was: a nonexistent mental condition ascribed to runaway slaves, explaining why they might want to leave their “benevolent” masters. Really?!?

After acquiring lunch and getting jump-scared by a wild, undomesticated Buc-ee’s, we continued to the trip’s main goal. You see, while my older daughter is a cacher, my younger daughter is not. She likes to ride along with us, but I sometimes fear that she’s bored on our trips. Consequently, I try to make sure there’s at least one thing she’ll like or find interesting each time. That is why the ultimate goal for the day was …

… Matagorda County. I told them about how my grandparents brought me to Bay City to see my grandmother’s family when I was little. My uncle was born here. My father was born fifteen miles away in the next county over. We also found a quick key box on a guardrail for a Traditional before continuing to the specially chosen Non-Traditional. We drove down to the seaside town of Matagorda and crossed a big old bridge leading to the Matagorda Bay Nature Park. There’s an EarthCache there at the end of the jetty (locked off that day, which was a little disappointing), but that was secondary. All that mattered was …

… for the first time, my daughters laid eyes on the Gulf of Mexico. Once we learned about the dangers of riptides and sent in our answers, we took time to consider the enormity of the sea. The older daughter opted not to step in, but the younger daughter could not resist the lapping waves. We took in the sea air and tried to avoid the legendary poisons of the Carcinogenic Coast. But all good things come to an end. Eventually, we got back in the car and began the trip back home, but not without hitting a couple more counties on the way.

In Jackson County, we picked up a Mystery Cache at a park. I had solved it the night before because I didn’t want to spend more time in the county than I had to. Our Traditional was at a local baseball park, in the supports holding up the back wall. And, finally, we drove into Hallettsville for the only Non-Traditional in the county, a Virtual at a hanging tree, and then drove out to a remote cemetery for our final cache of the trip.

Behold! A bark-covered matchstick holder! All right, so the container was replaced over the years.

And with that, we headed back into Central Texas. Six more counties were under our belt, or more to the point, her belt. My caching daughter is now 20 percent done with both the Texas County Challenge and the Texas Two Step. She’s done so much. And yet, there is so much left to do. But give her time.