The Barking Dogs

Sunday morning, Razorbackgirl hosted a bunch of us to a bit of Canuck culture by having an early-morning Event at Central Texas’s first Tim Hortons. I have sampled their fare before, specifically in Abbotsford a few years ago. I’m not super impressed, but it’s all right for what it is. There were a lot of us—enough that the manager on duty asked to photograph us all in front of the place (I assume for eventual marketing purposes). I think that should have rated free chai lattes and donut holes all around. That’s probably because I’ve long been an adherent of the donut lifestyle (a discussion for another, no doubt sugary, day), but that wasn’t important. What mattered was that we had gathered from as far away as San Antonio to commune. Or some kind of crap like that.

There were also actual dogs in attendance, thanks to Texas Six alumna Kittydcota. I even got the story of how one of the dogs—a rescue from Alaska—was shipped down here with the help of an Alaskan cacher, chosen for assistance based on his canine-friendly handle. The dogs have nothing to do with any of this, though. They’re only here so I can harvest some of those valuable puppy-motivated clicks for the algorithm*.

In early 2024, Razorbackgirl and I started working on a D5/T5 Virtual on Lake Georgetown. After the Canadian cultural exchange, we returned to hike some more of it. This time, however, we were accompanied by three others: HiDude_98, Mrs_HiDude, and The Outlaw. We parked cars at the parking lot for one of the side entrances and then returned to the same place we had started back in February 2024. And this time, instead of hiking right, we turned left.

After going for a bit, my lungs began to feel a fuzzy burning, my thighs began to ache, and my stomach was a little nauseated. That is when my brain gathered all my body parts together for a quick meeting: “What is wrong with all of you? We’ve only walked a quarter mile, and you know how to do this. Get it together and hike this trail!” I’m not a hiker by nature, but I have been on a few long walks, thanks to the US Army. My body remembered how all this worked, and the machine continued forward like the walking beast it can be.

As you can imagine, we grabbed a few caches on the way. I grabbed number 9,900. HiDude grabbed number 111,000. Despite the hills and trees we climbed to get these, the most epic one was the one tethered over a small crevasse. We were going to skip it, but someone noticed that the last finder had accidentally dropped the logbook into the crevasse. We fashioned a makeshift grabber from a branch, signed a spare log we were carrying, and then used the tool to extend the fresh log into the cache. Here’s to not falling down rocky cracks!

I ended up only logging a few of them. If I’m going to preserve my milestone at 10K for something special, I need to slow down my numbers, not find them all on one trip. Besides, I was there for the mile markers. We were in a bit of a race against the weather. We all knew a cold front was coming to the area, so we hoped to beat it into town. We set off just after 9:00 a.m. when it was almost seventy degrees, a bit warm for our outer layers. We didn’t beat the cold front; the wind blew in hard around 1:00 p.m., dropping the mercury to around sixty degrees. But it felt glorious against our sweating bodies and (for a couple of us) bleeding scratches. Somewhere around the five-mile point, all the dope I had front-loaded early that morning (ibuprofen, aspirin, and acetaminophen) began to wear off, and by the time I got to the six-mile point, my own dogs were barking a bit. But onward we went, photographing mile markers and finding caches.

Eventually, we made it back to the parking lot seven and a half miles from where we started. We were all a bit sore as we parted. I welcomed the soft embrace of my cardigan again. And we had done it. One more leg of the Goodwater Loop was complete. Eleven down, fourteen more to go!

^*_{Those of you who have followed me for any length of time know I don’t give a BLANK about “the algorithm.”}