The Completionists

Saturday morning, I drove up to Williamson County, intent on caching. I spent the last month avoiding any serious caching because I had something I needed to do. I’d been sitting on my (first) book for a long time, avoiding a second round of edits. At the end of October, I decided that if there was such a thing as NaNoWriMo, there could also be such a thing as NaNoEditMo. I set myself to do enough editing each day that I’d finish by the end of the month. I managed to finish on the penultimate day of November, so I decided to join a caching endeavor put on by the sometimes controversial but always decent TTO2.

We all gathered from all over the country (Florida, Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, and other states), with some visitors from Europe as well. Five of the Texas Six (myself included) were in attendance (the last one had to work). The primary goal was to do the Bart Simpson Geoart that some of us locals had been picking at for a while. Once that was done, we were going to attack a sister Traditional trail with a lot of FTFs still available after months because they were just that hard. Finally, we were going to tackle the nearby Granger Ducks, another Geoart of a mother duck being followed by baby ducks.

I was the first one at the gathering place. I could not attend the previous evening’s briefing, so I didn’t know that the original start time of 7:00 a.m. had been moved to 7:20 so that people staying overnight at a hotel could have time to eat breakfast. But soon enough, we were at a critical mass. And when the time came, we took to our cars and hit the back roads.

Kittydcota, Razorbackgirl, Krissy4884, and I were rolling together—a team within a team within a team. While everyone attending was a team, our car had further teamed up with two other cars and their occupants: one team from Arizona and the Norwegian/German team. We stuck together, helping each other on difficult hides, pulling out tools when required, and snacking each other up (I ate my fair share of Norwegian chocolates). The Bart hides were sometimes minorly difficult but not stressful; they went fast. The Ducks were also pretty easy; the hardest parts were the puzzles involved in getting corrected coordinates. The Traditional trail? Holy monkey! Those were a nightmare! Devilish containers in trees and cactus and various types of thorny bullcrap! We didn’t even get close to finding the entire trail. We literally didn’t have enough time. But the whole assemblage did a yeoman’s work to find as many as we could in the time we had. Once it began to get late, most people went south to prepare for the next day’s shenanigans, but I went home. I decided to sleep in my own bed instead of renting a hotel near the next day’s starting point, retaining money and comfort at the cost of an early two-hour drive.

The next morning officially started outside Castroville in Medina County, this time with only Kittydcota, Razorbackgirl, and myself. This time, even more cachers gathered to begin our new quarry: the challenge and Letterbox Hybrid trail that ran through four counties all the way to Floresville. We lined ourselves up and took to the highways and byways. I already knew that the challenges were chosen for different levels of skill and experience, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that they were not all the same; they were placed in various containers to make the experience more interesting than you might expect (though thorny bullcrap was, again, inescapable). They were mostly easy to find; challenges are usually meant to be found. The Letterboxes were similarly varied but dissimilarly more challenging. The three of us searched various terrains for our container-based prey and only managed to make a couple of wrong turns over the entire route. Our great caravan managed to do pretty good work on the trail, with only a few cache replacements made with the owners’ approvals (caches go missing sometimes). And once we had finally finished the trail, a nearby CITO gave us a chance to have one last hurrah before going off on our separate ways.

I have more book work to do, but taking a break to get out there with my friends was nice. Now, I am back to learning more about publishing.