Preparation For A Texas Challenge

A few days ago, a friend of mine (one of the Texas Six, if you must know) told me to check out the map west of Floresville.  Lo and behold, there were freshly dropped Mystery Caches and Letterbox Hybrids galore!  Someone else was kind enough to do the math and found over 550 challenges and 100 Letterboxes.  I instinctively started looking at the challenges (I can’t do much about the Letterboxes until I’m actually there).  There were some I could tell at a glance I qualified for, such as getting 5,000 caches in one country or doing all the counties in five states.  I was a little surprised I had completed some of them, like finding Webcams in ten states or a GeoTour cache in seven.  A few are still far beyond me, such as getting EarthCaches in 200 counties (I don’t even have 200 EarthCaches!) or logging a challenge on every day of the calendar.  A few were downright unfair to visitors (200 Events in Bexar County?  Really?), but overall, there are more than enough options for everyone.  Maybe you’ll even grab a few when you come to Texas Challenge.

But the unfair challenges did trigger a memory of my own (never published) unfair challenge.  Many, many moons ago, I picked up an Alphabetical County Challenge, which tasked me with finding a cache in alphabetical counties (no, there are no counties starting with x, so one with x in the name was good enough—though I picked up another similar challenge that required a county ending with x).  This would be easy for me because Texas counties start with every letter but q, and Quay County borders the Panhandle.  Once I made it to Mississippi’s Quitman County, I decided to kick it up a notch and make a Double Alphabetical County Challenge.  I figured that q counties would be the hard part: there are only five in the US, six if you count Puerto Rico (which is actually a county equivalent, but you get my point).  I submitted my new, more hardcore challenge, but it was denied.  The guidelines now prohibit challenges based on names (since cache names can be easily changed), and county names technically fall under that umbrella.  I could have appealed it to HQ, and maybe they would have let it slide since counties aren’t changing names easily or anytime soon (Connecticut and several Alaskan census areas notwithstanding), but I didn’t want to go through the trouble of bugging them.  Besides, I eventually realized that the entire challenge would be unfair to cachers from other states.  The real razor of the challenge wasn’t q counties but z counties.  There are only three of them, and two of them are in Texas.  Anyone around here who is hardcore enough to do my challenge has probably already completed the Texas County Challenge and gotten both, but anyone else would have had to come to Texas to complete it.  And if that challenge had gotten approved, you know I would have made a Triple Alphabetical County Challenge as well (yes, I’m still eying you, Ziebach County, South Dakota). 

I guess my point here (and I do have one) is that you should all thank me for my magnanimity. Or some kind of crap like that.  I’m not going to intentionally drag you to Texas just for a challenge.  But if you want to pick up some other challenges, we’ve got a few more here to find.