The Kine-Based Day

Since all the scuttlebutt around here has been about the new Geoart, it only made sense that part of the weekend would be about it, too. We had a small but growing roster of people working on the various puzzles for all the Mysteries, but only a few of them were solved. A few folks had gotten out on those roads and found some of them, but the lion’s share remained untouched and unattempted. Razorbackgirl reached out to me Friday. She thought it only fitting that Bartman get some of the FTFs on the art placed in his honor and wanted to know if I’d be up for coming with them to grab some. A thousand times yes, I would! The only drawback would be that we couldn’t start first thing in the morning. I had an obligation to fulfill first, but that turned out to be fine. We just decided to meet in the right area and go from there.

Saturday morning, I hosted the Austin edition of CITO Across Texas. Ours was a small affair. Most of the cachers in the area live farther north and attended the Round Rock or Georgetown CITOs. But for those of us who were there, it was a chance to lessen the burdens of Mother Earth. I even met a couple of cachers I hadn’t met before, one brand new and one sporadic since long before I started. As I bounced around picking things up, I got a photograph from my older daughter with her trash haul from the CITO in Longview. Once our stalwart crew recombined at the end, we presented our efforts to memorialize. All in all, about two hundred cachers came to thirty events statewide. Not bad for what we hope will be the first of many!

Once we had wrapped up the CITO, I headed north to Williamson County. It took a little longer than expected, thanks to some extreme slowdowns on I-35, but I finally got with Razorbackgirl and Bartman on a back road. We did a little planning, smoothed out a little discombobulation, and then set off—starting with some of the solved Mysteries.

Most of them were not too hard to find; their high Difficulty ratings were based on their puzzles. We had to do a little teamwork just to get to the right places since we didn’t all have the same caches with corrected coordinates. But we went from cache to cache, skipping a few places where we suspected caches were, but those puzzles hadn’t been solved yet. Most of them were FTFs for us, though we ran into a few that had already been found the day before. Some of them were annoyingly reminiscent of Bartman‘s hide styles, such as ones deep in thorny vines or behind poison ivy. Of course, since we had the man himself with us, we also had his tools at our disposal. Leathery elbow gloves made short work of those annoying ones. And when we found one fifteen feet up in a tree …

… he kindly went to get “the little pole” so we could pull it down. May I also say that I’m thinking about getting one of those little poles because it could fit in my caching bag. And yes, there is a big pole, but the hide crew didn’t have access to a thirty-footer themselves to necessitate Bartman pulling his out. All in all, we ended up finding twenty-five caches, including a couple of unrelated caches in the small town where we stopped for lunch. But once the day was getting toward its end, we went for one more cache. Along with the Mysteries, there was a line of Traditionals, and we were pointed at a D5/T5 that we wanted to attempt. We came to the roadside and went off into a field …

.. where we were greeted by a sea of very thorny cactus. Deep in that labyrinth was a micro waiting to be found. Of all the tools at Bartman‘s disposal, chaps were not among them. While we got close, we only found a surfeit of questionable language and prickly pears. I guess you can’t win ’em all. But we definitely won enough.