I picked up a cache yesterday that brought back memories. It was a nano, but it was placed by an art installation right next to an old piece of railroad trestle in downtown Austin. Many, many moons ago, I found a cache on that bridge under a blood red moon, and I’ve never forgotten it. I would have sworn I wrote about it, but I found it while I was writing and publishing my trip to West Texas, from Sonora to Sanderson. For a moment, I thought I might go ahead and talk about it, but it was a long time ago. Besides, the magic happened in that moment and no words can describe how it felt. I signed that new cache with a memory and a grin, but that’s not what I came to talk to you about.
A couple of days ago, I finally pulled the trigger. I placed my first Adventure Lab! Some friends are working on a GeoArt of Lab Caches for the upcoming Texas Challenge in Floresville, and since I had an unused Lab credit, I built a Lab devoted to Texas films. Another had been done on the same subject, but the creator of that one opted for the most obvious films (The Alamo and some other westerns), which left me some more modern options spanning multiple decades (contrary to what some people in the world seem to believe, cinema didn’t end with Some Like It Hot or Smokey and the Bandit).
Speaking of some people in the world, I awoke the next day to find that five people had already done my Lab. Great, I thought. But, knowing some people from the area, I thought it suspicious that they had gone out in the middle of the night just for a Lab series. I looked at the first five finders. Two had stats hidden, one had over thirty-eight thousand finds and every single one of them was a Lab, and the other two were in Germany and had never found a physical or virtual cache in Texas. Two questions immediately filled my head: How did they log these Labs? And, more importantly, how did they even know they had been created? The former question was easily answered; there are ways to spoof your location to look like you’re close to a Lab. Once that connection was made in my head, I figured out in ten minutes how to do it myself (though I only use knowledge for good, not for evil). As to the latter question, I’m still stumped. Is there a site that lists every Adventure Lab in the world? And, if so, does it send alerts regarding newly created Labs? I’m so confused! Don’t get me wrong. I guess I’m honored that someone on the other side of the planet decided to do my Labs, but it seems pointless to go through all that trouble for something so silly. But whatever. I’ll probably just start ignoring it all soon enough. I’ve got other things to do. I’ve got plans to make, a book to work on, caches to create, and maybe, just maybe, another series of Labs to plan. We shall see.
Geocaching While Black 