I needed to pick a Virtual to complete my collection of egg-based digital doodads. I had long since gotten all the Virtual caches in Austin, so I needed to go a little farther afield for one. Some were more preferred than others. The one at the old Confederate campground, though the closest, was right out because, well, you know… I’ll get it one day when I’m in the area, but I wasn’t going to give it a special trip. The one located at San Marcos’s former water amusement park and dedicated to its star, Ralph the Swimming Pig, might have been fun, especially as it required a ride on a glass-bottomed boat. I decided to save that one for a day the girls could enjoy it with me. That left one last option that wasn’t the Goodwater Loop. I drove east out to Bastrop, and on the edge of town, I turned south for a few miles.
I pulled into the parking lot of The Gas Station, which, ironically enough, doesn’t sell gas. Why was it worth the drive or a Virtual? Because it was famously (for certain values of “famous”) a gas station in the now legendary horror movie The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. It is no longer an operative gas station but rather a barbecue restaurant, purveyor of horror paraphernalia, and—curiously enough—a park with camping and cabins. I took a few minutes to grab a cold drink and peruse the memorabilia and autograph books (they host horror icons regularly for events) before setting to work looking for the answer the Virtual required. I stepped outside the door in time to see a man dressed as the big bad of the movie, Leatherface, being filmed by his partner. While he did not emulate the legendary Chainsaw Dance, he was kind enough to ham it up for me for some photographs. After the fun diversion, I did my work, had my official cache for the day, and received a slightly ghostly, slightly digitized piece of ovoid art. With that, my Easter egg collection was complete.
I also noticed I was across the street from another cache, this one in a cemetery. Normally, I would have skipped it; I had a cache for the day already. But there’s another collection that tempts me to complete it, that one requiring Traditionals of higher Difficulty and lower Terrain. This one fit the criteria, so I drove across the road for it.
The cache was nothing special: the standard pill bottle in a tree; it took longer to drive to it than to find it. I logged it and then looked for the new treasure I expected to be waiting for me under the Navigational Tools section. Except there wasn’t one. I was confused. It met all the criteria, so where was my new doodad? I pondered the question as I made the drive home, and then I remembered that part of the idea behind treasures is that they might sometimes have a percentage chance of finding them instead of a flat treasure-per-find operation. Perhaps these are more random that way, possibly becoming harder to get the farther along you go. I decided to not go out of my way to find these. The collection is not time limited, so if I just keep doing what I already do, I’ll get the rest eventually. Besides, I had looked at both the cold ground of the grave and a bringer of death already. I’d done enough. And once I had returned home, I had earned my own little slice of death, a late afternoon nap. And afterward, some life-affirming sushi.
Geocaching While Black 