Ice Caching

For certain values of “ice,” that is.

I went up to L-Town this weekend. I was hesitant to make the trip because all the weather reports had been talking about snow and ice in East Texas, and while it would have been light and burned off during the day, I usually travel in the middle of the night. I didn’t need to slide on ice in the frozen early morning into a ditch or some kind of crap like that. But no (measurable) precipitation of any kind fell, so I drove. Once I arrived, I took the girls to grab a few counties.

We started in Atlanta! No, not that Atlanta, the one in Cass County. We started with a Virtual at an old rail depot. The decommissioned engine there had a serial number on the side that was visible from the car, which was nice in the near-freezing temperatures. Once we sent the serial and claimed a Non-Traditional, we went to a nearby cemetery (there always is one) and found a Traditional covered in unmelted ice in a fork of a great oak tree. For a moment, there was concern that a muggle vehicle in the cemetery would decide to look in on us, but they expressed no interest in our activities. Fine by us. We were done with the county anyway.

From there, we went up to Texarkana. The caching daughter didn’t have a find in Arkansas yet, so we went over to that side of town to get an EarthCache dedicated to brickmaking in Arkansas. I couldn’t help feeling a powerful déjà vu as we did. Later, once I returned home, I realized I had done an EarthCache on the same subject from the same CO back in Sapulpa, of all places! After submitting our answers, we returned to the Texas side and found a Traditional at the Ace of Clubs House. A baby soda bottle awaited us under a brick on the fence line. That took care of our Traditional. There were only three Non-Traditionals in Bowie County, all of which were Wherigos, and the closest two were right on top of each other down the road in New Boston. And you’ll never guess where they were.

At the Bowie County Courthouse, of all places! I downloaded the Wherigo cartridge but couldn’t get it to work properly. I despaired about looking inadequate in front of my children for a quarter of a second (which was silly because I’ve dropped the ball in front of them enough times) but then remembered that, as I have mentioned a couple of times before, heroes have friends. I called up The Outlaw since he had found it previously (and, it turned out, helped to hide it). Instead of talking me through my technical issue, he just gave me the final coordinates of one of them. My children and I lifted the appropriate lamppost skirt and signed the logbook because a cache is a cache is a cache, and with that, we were done with Bowie County.

Because of our limited time (thanks to short days) and our detour into Arkansas (Texarkana was a bit of a detour), we only had time for one more county, and only one was on the way back to Longview. That’s how we ended up passing through Daingerfield. The first cache was easy enough: a Virtual at a local high school closer to the edge of the county. We were initially suspicious of all the cars there on a Saturday, but there was a basketball game, so that made sense. We found what we needed there and then continued south toward town. A Traditional was on a side road, which may have originally been a logging road until a couple of people built houses on it. In a shady spot near an access gate, we trudged over a last bit of ice untouched by the sun and found a birdhouse on a post. And once we signed its log, we were done for the day.

We have two more trips to the north and west (a bit closer to Dallas than I would like) and one for some things between Tyler and Waco, and we’ll be pretty much done with Northeast Texas. I think Southeast Texas will follow that, but I don’t foresee that taking too long. This year’s Challenge will get us south of San Antonio, possibly all the way down to Corpus Christi (but don’t quote me on that last bit). After that, it starts getting rough. The Panhandle ain’t no joke. And the West? I’m not even ready to think about that yet.