Pressed Into Service

I put my children to work a bit for me this weekend. Sometime last year, I got their help looking for a cache up in a tree that I hadn’t been able to find after multiple attempts. My caching daughter managed to spot it, and my muggle daughter was willing to climb to get it, but the cache was hanging out on a limb that wouldn’t have been safe for her, and I was without a pole. (I had lent it to a friend.) I took mental note of where it was, and we went and found another cache. On Saturday, I dragged them back out to that tree cache because I had managed to lose it again. We began to put our eyes to it for a bit, but that was short-lived because it had been archived, so no cache for us. Gather ye caches while ye may, folks! As fate would have it, nearby was another cache that I had tried and DNF’d years ago and had just not gotten back around to. So I went ahead and dragged their eyeballs to it. We spent a few minutes in the chill poking around in rocks until my muggle daughter pulled the right rock out of a karst hole to reveal the cache. It had recently rained, so the accumulated dirt had obscured the pill bottle under just enough mud to obscure it completely. I’m not disparaging her eagle eye, but we never would have seen it. Luck was with us.

For quite a while, I have been taking my children on drives with me to find caches. These days, I have more of an excuse now that there’s another cacher who wants to go to every county in Texas and anywhere else available, but before there were two cachers in the car, I just wanted them to see things and go places. No, it’s not entirely altruistic or me being a good father. When I go up to Longview to see them, well, the city is kind of boring to me. How many times can we go to a park, eat at a restaurant, or run some errands? There’s nothing for me there besides them, so dragging them around was (and is) a great excuse to grab more caches in more counties. This means that I have wrestled from time to time with the question of whether I’m carting them around for them or carting them around for me. And I’ve come to realize the answer is a little from Column A and a little from Column B. The first time I took them to Louisiana was to get a few counties I had to cut off my first solo trip there. Pike County was totally because they wanted to visit Crater of Diamonds Park. Hugo happened because I wanted to see the Showmen’s Rest, and they liked the idea as well. Had I world enough and time (and, just as importantly, money), I’d happily drag them up to West Virginia for GeoWoodstock. Or maybe to Pensacola because it’s close to Bamarama. I’d love to take them to GeoCoinFest in Castle Rock because it’s close to family they’ve never met (CacheFest Oklahoma was ostensibly to visit family in Norman), and, of course, there’s a big damn hole near Flagstaff they ought to see. I guess what really matters is what they get out of it. They seem to like it and want to go on more drives, so I’ll keep doing it with them until they get tired of it. And if it lets me have an excuse to do something, why not?