Trust But Verify

Yesterday, I picked up a challenge I thought I needed to help me complete a different challenge. I was wrong, but none of that really matters. Right now, I’m swimming in challenges after the activities of the weekend. They will all, of course, be claimed in due time. Normally, when I log a challenge, I choose the challenge I’ve finished that’s been sitting around the longest. But I may be breaking that rule because some of these newly found challenges actually do complete other challenges I’ve had sitting around for the longest time. After going through the checkers of some of them, I noticed that a few of them were wrong. Little by little, we have gained more trust in them, both because Groundspeak requires them for a challenge now and because they make life so much easier (you used to have to maintain your own list for the Texas County Challenge, but now it is so much easier). That said, I’ve never seen someone refused a find on a challenge for an incorrect checker. I don’t know if COs even look at that very closely once the cache and checker are connected. That all started me thinking about a challenge I’ve had sitting around for a very long time. It is somewhat suited to me, but not entirely—you have to complete a Fizzy, but each cache must be in a different county. It also has a checker, so I decided to run it because it had been a while. I’ve always been a little leery of that checker because it has given me varying results on several occasions. When I ran it this time, it said I had completed sixty-three of eighty-one counties. That felt off. I get that when I’m on the road, I don’t tend to pick up bigger or more obscure D/T combinations, but I was fairly sure I was further along than that. The checker, unlike most, specifically notes that you may want to “simply try to find a solution by hand [because] sometimes you may do better than this checker.” Well, I had a little time on my hands, so I did just that. I cracked open a spreadsheet and started poring through maps of all my finds, sorted by D/T, and noting the counties they had come from. One of the reasons I have not completed this challenge despite having twenty-three loops to my name is that most of my finds are clustered in around twenty counties, covering most of my looping. I went down the list one by one. Because my finds are so clustered, a number of D/Ts in the middle, especially around T3.5, did not have their own counties. But when I was done, it turned out I had seventy-three counties out of eighty-one. If I were to strategically log some of the new challenges, I could probably increase that to seventy-seven. Who knows? If I can manage to get to a Mega outside of the state, I could theoretically finish this challenge. But if I didn’t pull out the spreadsheet and examine the numbers myself, I might still be disheartened about finishing it.

Nota bene.