I could regale you with tales of high adventure, but I would be spinning all the lies if I did so. While you might normally expect a visit with the girls to involve returns to Texas counties scarce remembered by me, that didn’t happen this weekend for a few reasons. That means you’re stuck with the boring, day-to-day caching-adjacent stuff I do when I’m not doing glamorous things.
Friday afternoon, I went south. As an Austinite, I usually don’t like to cross the river (more officially known as Lady Bird Lake, but the real ones still call it Town Lake) without good reason. Well, I had a good reason, and when that was over, I ran down to Buda for my cache. I parked in a subdivision park and walked over to the tree at ground zero to find a baby soda bottle under a rock at the base. I’m a little amazed that the hide has lasted four years. But I guess it’s far enough from the play facilities that kids aren’t going to mess with it and not near the trails, so dogs wouldn’t mess with it, either. It was nothing special, but it was a find, and a cache is a cache is a cache.
The girls came into town Saturday morning for a slightly extended stay since they don’t have school Thanksgiving week. Unfortunately, I still have to work part of their stay, but we’re crossing that bridge now. Once they arrived, they helped me find a daily cache, a spider hidden in a tree. Its location was at “eye level,” but that varied depending on if you were at the top of the retaining wall or at the bottom in a wooded area. But find it we did and then got on our way to a home improvement store (one that rhymes with “toes,” not Home Despot). I had to pick up a few items for some cache maintenance: spray paint, plumbing cement, and an eye hook. I’ve had a cache I needed to replace for quite some time, but it’s a big deal to rebuild. I’ve also had a couple of simpler ones go missing. So, I needed supplies.
Minor but related diversion: Have any of you noticed a change in magnetic key boxes lately? They used to have actual metal magnets in them, but in the last year or so, they’ve basically had magnetic strips in them, like in flat magnets or lower-quality refrigerator magnets. I ordered a batch of them a while ago, and because of an obvious mispricing, I thought I was getting a good deal. Even mispriced, they weren’t worth it. So, I ordered some from a more local company and thought they would be the older style. Guess again. So now I’m going to have to hunt down a hookup for old-school key boxes. I don’t need that right now.
Sunday, we made preliminary plans to have a driveabout up to some more northerly counties to do what we do to advance my caching daughter’s Project. The plans were discarded because of family stuff—specifically, cousins the girls haven’t had a chance to see in a while, thanks to scheduling conflicts and real life getting in the way. My non-caching daughter and I spray-painted a replacement container for one of my missing hides, but we cachers still needed a cache, so we slipped out for one. By chance, right before we were leaving, a new cache dropped to the northwest, so we decided to go get an FTF. The drive led us to a church parking lot. Normally, I don’t get involved with a cache at a church on a Sunday, but it was late enough in the day that it wouldn’t be an issue. Ground zero was at a pile of rocks, which was to be expected for a cache called “Rocky.” My daughter and I bickered over whether a rock wall a bit off GZ could be considered a pile of rocks (yes, though piled in an ordered state) as we scampered over the rocks at our feet and found a plastic jar containing wooden leaves, fake gemstones, and an unadulterated logbook. Once invenimus, inscripsimus, reposuimus, we drove home, bickering about whether or not foxes are dogs (I say no, but my daughter has a legit point that they are part of the family Canidae).
That’s it. No drives to other counties or states. No epic caches. No best-laid plans of mice or men gang aft agley. Not this weekend, anyway.
Geocaching While Black 