I Am Gonna Make It Through This Year

This high-maintenance machine (and by that, I mean me) is looking forward.  If I fail to plan, I plan to fail, or so they say.  I prefer to think I’m like water, shifting with the tides and flowing where opportunities present themselves, but that also has drawbacks.  I recently realized that I have to go back to Bowie County because I missed a town for the I’ve Been Everywhere Challenge.  I passed close enough between Atlanta and Texarkana and on the way to New Boston, but because I didn’t plan that trip properly (it really was a seat-of-the-pants affair), I dropped the ball and must return.  That has inspired me to spend a little time thinking about what I’m doing in the next few months and possibly the rest of this year.

Let us assume that I’m going to Texas Challenge in March.  As stated before, if I do nothing else, I will be doing that.  That is both a joy and a contractual obligation.

I’ve been looking at Community Celebrations popping up around here and in other places in the state.  The last time they were flying about, I went to the local ones but didn’t focus on the ones farther away.  Now I’m wondering whether I want to or not.  It would be nice to gather more of a cache type I haven’t gotten that many of, but if I travel for them, I’m going to want to find other caches as well.  That means I’d need to hold off on that until after Challenge since I’m busy deciding what cache 10K will be and rationing caches based upon that. 

Treasures?  What’s that going to be about?  I only heard scuttlebutt last week that something new would be coming out, so I was really curious how this was going to work.  Would it be a limited-time thing or a continuous thing in the background from now on?  While I’m not a souvenir chaser specifically, I do like little tchotchkes because who isn’t wired that way? Luckily for me, PodCacher had an interview with Bryan about them, as did Challenge Talk if you’re a bit more visual. It looks like they will be more like sets of collectible images that can be tweaked and adjusted by HQ to be found based on different cache types, D/Ts, regions, or any number of other criteria. You find an appropriate cache, and it pops up for you. It sounds like a fun little side thing, and if it gets people out to other caches, especially ones they might not go for on their own, that’s cool. I happily endorse a new dopamine hit!

We all know about the wildfires (they’re actually conflagrations because they started in urban areas, but whatever) in California.  From a purely caching perspective, they have preemptively taken Southern California off the board for me this year and possibly next year.  The last thing they need is some rando getting in the way while they get their crap back together.  This leaves me with three realistic possible travel targets in the next year: Nebraska, which I need to return to for … reasons; Colorado and Utah, since I want to get Colorado done and over with, and I might as well dip into Utah while I’m there; and (the rough one) heading east to work the South.  I’ve been avoiding that for a very long time, especially since I’m not delighted with certain things politically.  But I’m also realizing that there has never been an especially good time to go and who knows when there ever will be?  Wilkinson is the closest county I don’t have yet, and if I don’t want another 24-county year, I need to go back to getting what I can when I can. 

I want to go to GeoWoodstock so badly it hurts, but I don’t think I will be able to make it. There’s not zero chance quite yet, but the limit is definitely approaching zero. Hope springs eternal, though. I’d be more than happy to report to you all that I lied. Besides, I need more West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. And I haven’t even been to Ohio yet!

And that’s about as far as I can foresee at the moment. I’m not a fortune teller, you know. If I could see the future, well, I’d probably do something with that!