Assuming you haven’t been living under a rock for the last couple of months, you know that International EarthCache Day was yesterday. Saturday, my daughter and I were the recipients of the new souvenir. With muggle daughter in tow, we went out to Dripping Springs for brunch with friends and then to a local park for an EarthCache. It was a little different from normal ones because, focusing on the positions of sunrise during the solstices, it was less about earthly phenomena than about astronomical phenomena. I’m not trying to rat it out or anything, but it resulted in me making some calculations I haven’t made in decades—since my days in college. Technically, those calculations were not as accurate as they could have been since they were taken not from ground zero but from the shaded park bench one hundred feet from GZ. But that’s the great thing about astronomical calculations: unless you’re trying to land on the moon or run a global positioning system, a hundred feet is not a significant factor—less than two-hundredths of a minute of arc on the surface of the Earth. We did some math, submitted our answers and logs, and voilà!
Sunday, I dragged my cacher, this time without her sister, to Round Rock for the daily cache. When I looked at a map to decide where to go, I saw one I had gone after in my early days of caching but never found. I also noticed it had been found the day before, so why not. She helped me find my unofficial DNF from the early days of caching. Having found it, I’m 95 percent convinced I was just looking at the foot of the wrong tree the first time, as it was the obvious place since it was more rooty, branchy, and viney. The actual hiding place was disappointing, to say the least: the foot of a dead and pruned bush. Of course, back then, I was far more fixated on correct coordinates. I hadn’t yet internalized the vagaries of positioning and the importance of that plus or minus thirty feet we all know and loathe. One more smiley was good enough.
That is all. You may now return to your regularly scheduled program.
Geocaching While Black 