The Day Before…

The girls and I got up early to go on with our day. The original plan was to hit some more southwesterly counties and then finish with our other must-stop location of the trip, but plans had to change a little because my body betrayed me. Something was going on in here, and I didn’t want to risk being in such remote places as Tilden or Frio County. We stayed closer to Floresville on the off chance that I needed to return to our room. I could easily endure a short thirty- or forty-mile drive if I had to. That cut into the counties we had planned, including the one we had moved from the day before, but it worked out all right.

The morning began at a coffee shop outside of Jourdanton for a Pi Day Event hosted by the one and only Captain Math. How could I miss his sixteenth annual Event? I couldn’t! There were games! There were drinks!

There was even a Geocaching Vlogger in attendance if you’re into that kind of thing! The only thing that was amiss about the Event was a startling lack of pie. In fact, at no point over the course of the day did either of the girls or I eat pie. There is something existentially wrong with that, but somehow, we overcame it. Our original plan would have had us going west as we left the parking lot, but we went east instead, stopping in Pleasanton for a couple of caches on the way out of Atascosa County.

We went over to Karnes County for a couple of caches in a cemetery. The Multicache wasn’t of particular note, but the Traditional (though I didn’t know it at the time) had been placed by a now-departed friend, Hello-Pittie. Had I known, I might have felt more sentimental about it, but at that moment, a cache was a cache was a cache.

We returned to DeWitt County to find a Mexican cemetery on the outskirts of a German town. As had been decided the day before, we grabbed a Mystery Cache there, completing that county before continuing on to the second primary goal of our collective travels: Gonzales.

You see, both sides of the girls’ family pass through Gonzales. My great-great-grandfather settled there in the 1870s after leaving Georgia, married a local woman, and had a good handful of kids, one of whom eventually moved to Austin and ultimately resulted in me. On the other side, one of their mother’s ancestors, a member of the Old Three Hundred, basically owned the county and much of the land around it. We ended up stopping at the Gonzales Memorial Museum. Not only does it still have the Virtual that was the cache I first got there, but I also had to show them …

… The Cannon. Their ancestor accompanied that cannon to the area from Mexico, so I thought they should see it, considering its iconic status. We also picked up a Traditional in a park a few blocks from the museum and then started heading back to Floresville. That was probably for the best because that day was a much rougher drive than normal for me.

From there, we decided to visit Signal! He came to the event center on a fire engine, but I missed his grand entrance for several reasons. That was all right, though. We endured the “dulcet” tunes of a DJ as we ate from food trucks, grabbed Adventure Labs, and (some of us) went through a mobile escape room! It was a nice chance to enjoy not being on the road (which is not my normal state of being, so that should say something). I learned that our hosts had unintentionally created the largest Adventure Lab GeoArt in the world! I was a small part of that, but I can’t say I was welling with pride for an accidental accomplishment. But amid the fun and frolic, the big event loomed. I knew that the next morning would be a moment of consequence. The next morning would be war (or, more likely, a mild kerfuffle). In our hearts, many of us were preparing for…