Yesterday afternoon, I went for an FTF in south central Austin. I didn’t find it, which is fine because I didn’t like it. The CO, who has fewer than fifty finds, placed it outside a private residence that was chosen because of a waterfall mural painted on the side. While they mentioned that it wasn’t inside the surrounding wall, it did require walking on the landscaping bordering the street near a high-muggle area. I should probably say directly at a high-muggle area because people frequently park around GZ to go to the actual high-muggle areas. I gave it about fifteen minutes of unaggressive searching. The hint that the cache was at “squirrel height” meant nothing. It wasn’t in the tree, neither high nor low. It wasn’t in the divots in the wall. I couldn’t see anything in the landscaping (pure white rocks covering every walking surface from the curb to the wall). I stopped looking when the house received a food delivery. The cache was too close to the walkway for me to escape notice, so I slipped off before the homeowners responded. I know this one will probably sit unfound for a while. During the day, there are muggles. At night, any flashlight will draw the homeowners’ attention if they’re remotely close to their front windows.
Defeated but not disheartened, I redeployed to the next nearest cache, a Multi beginning at the mural on the side of a mechanic’s garage. I spent a few minutes counting the features depicted, lucky that graffiti had not obscured anything I needed to see. Once I had my coordinates, I redeployed to a bridge and found a nano attached to a support.
I no longer find myself picking up caches in the center of town. I spent years grabbing local caches and have cleared out all but the most difficult Traditionals, (I know of at least three that will need boats), the most confusing puzzles (I’m not up on Enigma emulators, OK?), and possibly the most difficult Whereigo in Christendom (a D5/T5 that requires finding twenty-five unknown locations that may or may not still exist and a boat). But it was nice to drive the streets of Austin for a while instead of going out to the surrounding communities. I don’t get around town as much as I did in my heady younger days. I spend my spare time at home or writing lately. It’s not like I go out much, and the one non-geocaching social thing I do after dark (karaoke, if you must know) is within walking distance from home.
Am I getting boring? Maybe. Or maybe I just need to get back out on the road. Carting the girls around is fun and all, but I’m not making progress on my own Great Project either, now am I?
Geocaching While Black 