Saturday morning began in an atypical way. There is a recurring monthly Event in Georgetown that’s been going on longer than I’ve been caching (of course, with a hiatus during the “Time of Cholera”). In all my years of caching, I’ve attended the Event only once because it traditionally happened at 7:30 a.m. Why on God’s green earth would I want to get up that early on a Saturday that didn’t involve a road trip? Therefore, they would meet, and I would sleep the sleep of the just. However, I needed to meet up with someone who would be in attendance this Saturday, and I learned that the hosts had moved the start time back an hour to 8:30 a.m. While that is still a time I would rather be in bed, it is a little more reasonable. So I dragged myself out of bed and headed up there for my second attendance at this area institution. And now that I know it starts later, there’s a greater chance I might attend a third or possibly even a fourth time. But don’t hold your breath just yet.
The host pointed out something interesting to me. Usually, the Austin/Round Rock area has a plethora of Events going on over the course of any month. This month, however, only has two currently on the calendar: this one and the annual solstice event I’m hosting. I hadn’t noticed it because my calendar shows all Events within a hundred miles, and I’m seeing lots of them in the San Marcos and San Antonio areas. I’m tempted to pass this off as just a statistically weird month. Usually, since there’s a good handful of Events to choose from, if I miss one, there’s another right around the bend to attend. Maybe the stars just misaligned, and none of the usual suspects are able to put one on this month. Of course, I was a little worried that this is part of a trend I’m not seeing. Luckily, we have tools to help generate some data. I warmed up Project-GC to provide some numbers, and the results were a little surprising, partially because I got slightly different results by searching in slightly different ways. I also suspect that some of my numbers may be inaccurate because I can’t search for specific archived cache types and because some counties have so many archived caches that I might not be getting all the former Events (searches top out at 10,000 results). All that said (and if someone can produce better numbers, I’m all ears), Travis County has had 16 events of all types (Event Cache, CITO, Community Celebration, and Mega) thus far in 2025, 36 in 2024, and 689 lifetime; Williamson County has had 16 thus far in 2025 with one more on deck and one slated for next year, 39 in 2024, and 399 lifetime (which I find a little hard to believe); and Bexar County (which I was using as a comparison since they seem to have Events all the time) has had 22 thus far in 2025 with 3 on deck, 26 (?) in 2024, and 613 lifetime. I find it a bit ironic that the numbers I have the least faith in happen to be my chosen control numbers, but that’s beside the point. Perhaps there are actually fewer Events than it feels like, and we’re doing all right in that regard. Or perhaps the numbers are dwindling, but I’d have to take some deeper dives to determine that, both into historic counts in these counties and in other cities and counties to get a better picture. Either way, if I want to work on this, I need to come up with a better method of acquiring my data—preferably one that doesn’t have me questioning from the get-go.
Now, do I actually want to work on this? That’s a more interesting question…
Geocaching While Black 