The weekend put me back in scenic L-Town, visiting the girls. Being in scenic L-Town meant we got on the road pretty much as soon as I got there. First, we popped over to Harrison County, where all we needed was a Non-Traditional. That was easy enough. Since I’m a bit of a pack rat, I still had all the corrected coordinates for a hot air balloon Geoart placed for Texas Challenge a couple of years ago. We picked the easiest of them and got our first smiley of the day.
Carthage, on the other hand, was a pain. We popped into town for our Traditional (a decently done Travel Bug Hotel) and some snacks before heading to the outer edges of the county for a Non-Traditional (a Multi in a remote cemetery). It’s not that Panola County was bad in and of itself, but for some reason, it was just a giant time sink. It was mostly because I didn’t pay attention to the map, so I dragged us all over the county when a single, slightly rounder route would have covered everything more efficiently. It probably took us thirty to forty-five minutes longer to get everything done in the county than it should have. Many times, I stated that Carthago delenda est, but I couldn’t help but spare it. After all, it gave us the movie Bernie, resulting in the most correct description of Texas ever put on film (biases accounted for, of course).
From there, we continued on to the center of Center. We had grabbed a Traditional in Shelby County on the last trip, so this time, we did a Multi at the Shelby County Courthouse. (It’s always nice to visit an old friend.) The Multi led us to a nearby pocket park, where we searched in vain. One of the logs noted that a previous finder got an important clue from one of the photos. Luckily, my caching daughter noticed the right clue in the right photo, allowing us to make the find. Truth be told, though, the cache was a bit disappointing; it was a baggie with a log hidden in the brick wall. I’ve definitely seen better brick wall hides. But we got what we came for, and a cache is a cache is a cache. We mounted back up and got moving again.
Sabine County was a tale of two cemeteries. The first one was tiny, and we almost missed it—just a few new graves in the corner of an incredibly remote churchyard. It was remarked upon that nobody would have wanted to look for the cache at night. The looming, swamp-like trees that betrayed our closeness to the Louisiana border, daunting enough during the day, would have induced far more anxiety after dark. That the Traditional was hanging from some sort of abandoned storage shack in the tree line provided final confirmation that we were in a horror film waiting to happen. We made our marks and then made our way the heck out of Dodge. The second cemetery turned out to be a comedy of errors. Going after another Multi, we found the redirector, made our coordinate changes, and then searched ground zero, finding nothing. We looked at the hint, letting us know that it was in neither bog nor tree, and looked again—again finding nothing. I introduced my daughter to the age-old TOTT Phone-a-Friend. One of the Texas Six, 4everlyn, had been there a few weeks before, so I got her on the horn. Sadly, she couldn’t remember it because they had found a lot of caches, and she couldn’t envision that specific one. But as I paced around talking to her, I spotted it! You know why we didn’t find it? Because the last person to find it stuck it in the branches of a tree, which was exactly where the hint said not to look for it! What the heck, man? (This once, I will be gender assumptive because I’ve met the cacher who did it!)
Finally, we popped over to San Augustine, picking up another Travel Bug Hotel on the way into town. Passing by the courthouse during a Sassafras Festival, we avoided the revelers randomly crossing the street as the girls both gawked at what was, for me, a forgotten wonder. Remember the “arboreal tree house kind of church”? It’s not a church. It’s actually a dude’s house. It had grown two stories in the last four and a half years, with another flat level and a lookout tower, and was festooned with political and religious messages as well as ads for the homeowner’s businesses as a carpenter (I’ll buy that), deck builder (proven beyond all doubt), and tai chi instructor (slightly more dubious, but what do I know?). We popped over to the Mission Dolores Historic Site for one final Multi of the day. Our search turned up nothing until my caching daughter sat down to tie her shoe and, from her new angle, easily spotted the cache.
And with that done, we headed back north to take the girls home. Covering 270 miles, we only got eight caches, but we completed five counties for the TCC and Texas Two Step. Heck, she might actually get these challenges done one day.
Geocaching While Black 