Step By Step, Inch By Inch

Our slow and inexorable progression continued this weekend. After picking up the girls in L-Town, we headed north and northwest. I’m still keeping an eye on my find count. If I want my ten thousandth to be the approaching Block Party, I can’t get too many without jeopardizing my current streak (which I officially don’t care about, but whatever). But only five counties were on the agenda for the day, and ten finds (we’re working on her Texas County Challenge and Texas Two-Step) wouldn’t jeopardize any of that. There was a minor complication in that my daughter’s Premium subscription ran out, and the gifting system is currently down (you don’t think I make her pay for it, do you?), meaning that she couldn’t access many of the caches in the main app because they were too high in Difficulty (above 1.5) or Terrain (above 2). So I had to take more of the lead than I like to (the TCC is her project, after all), but I’m the one carting everyone around, so it’s not like that’s actually a huge difference.

We began the day in Pittsburg. Many moons ago, I solved a Jigidi-based Mystery up there in anticipation of this exact moment. It was child’s play to drive into the parking lot of an unoccupied building and then find a bison on the appropriate post. We then drove deeper into town to the parking lot of a church. There was minimal activity there. A couple of trucks, one red and one white, were moving items and people between them. We drove up beside the appropriate lamppost. My daughter jumped out and found our quarry under its skirt. As she returned it and got back in the car, a white truck parked beside us, which was suspicious because there were a hundred empty parking spots not next to us. I assumed one of the aforementioned trucks decided to check on the random vehicle in their parking lot (it wouldn’t be the first time), so I made a point of fiddling with the map on my phone (which I needed to do anyway) and then driving off with them none the wiser. I pulled out of the lot and onto the street when my daughter said the most unexpected thing: “They’re cachers!” I looked in my rearview mirror, and sure enough, one of them was lifting the exact same skirt we had been at. I busted a U-turn (legal anywhere in Texas unless specifically prohibited) and then went back to chat with our almost-missed comrades. Imagine my surprise to find Arkansas cachers LostandFound28 (whom I had met before) and her husband, Eagle95 (whom I don’t think I had)! After introductions (her spouse and my children), we all talked a little bit about their plans (they were headed for Austin), our plans, and Challenge in two weeks, and then parted ways. We were all on a bit of a schedule, after all.

Near Mount Pleasant, we hit a couple of unremarkable cemetery caches, a Traditional and a Multicache, that were close together and took care of our needs. Mount Vernon offered different quarry. A Mystery I had solved the night before by finding an appropriate Beck lyric led us to a hillside park on a small lake. After I literally stumbled across the perfect walking stick, we found a guardrail in the middle of the property that once may have blocked off a now disused road played host to a small tin and log. Invenimus, inscripsimus, reposuimus.

Mount Vernon‘s Traditional offered me both an opportunity to fix a long-passed mistake and a chance for cache economy. The same cache I found five years ago was still active, but I didn’t photograph it then. I brought the girls here for a Traditional, allowing me to record it for posterity and save on finds for the day. I didn’t need another Traditional, meaning I had extra leeway in case my count got tighter.

Delta County turned into a flashback in more ways than one. I wanted a specific cache because it gave me a new state name for a challenge I’ve been working for a long time. When we got to the cache, it was an old jug destroyed by years of sun exposure, much like I had encountered five years before in Bowie County. I checked the most recent (year-and-a-half-old) logs to see that a previous finder had put in a “request maintenance” log when that’s what they were still called. I logged the find (we did find it, after all), then put in a “request reviewer attention log” and gathered up the cracked and broken plastic. That thing was trash, and the owner had a year and a half to do something about it. It was long past time for it to be archived.

We later had to go into Cooper proper, giving me a chance to espy an old friend in the process. We ended up looking for a Multi in a cemetery (shocker, right?). We found the redirector, I plugged in the numbers, and they led behind the cemetery. We drove around back to find that ground zero was in the middle of a construction project on a ranch entrance. I tried to figure out why that math wasn’t mathing and discovered it was because I didn’t actually do the math. Our redirector numbers involved a small equation I had missed. Once I did the correct math, the actual GZ was inside the cemetery. I am the reason we can’t find caches.

Our final county of the day was Red River County. I didn’t want to go all the way to Clarksville, so we cut the closest point, which also contained a Multi and a Traditional in (you guessed it) cemeteries. The first one was a bit of a surprise for a couple of reasons. The Multi required seeing a redirector to choose an answer from a list of options, each correlating to a set of possible coordinates. The correct choice was the one that seemed on its face to be the joke option. But the real surprise came when a couple of people parked to visit something in the cemetery. What are the odds of that in the middle of nowhere? We had a cover story in place already (we visit old cemeteries when we pass through places), so we started heading back to the car, intending to slip over to GZ if possible or retreat and hit another location if not. But the unexpected visitors gave us no scrutiny, simply a wave and a hello. We returned the greetings, managed to get the cache without further issue, and then get down the road to a final cache, wrapped in UCP tape and, therefore, easy to find¹. And with that, our adventure was done. Five counties were added to the tally (once my daughter got home and logged them on her computer), and I had picked up a cache that got me to the halfway point on my oldest extant challenge. The only somewhat easy counties left in Northeast Texas are the ones beyond Tyler. Soon, we may have to start looking at two-day trips to Houston/Beaumont or Abilene. But not before we start doing some of South Texas.

¹_{It is rare for you to hear me say that the Marines are better than the Army at much of anything, but MARPAT is far superior.}