Maybe Not Quite So Hard

So, I needed to get a cache. I also wanted to work on filling that virtual shelf. So I took a drive down to South Austin. There’s a greenbelt there which would help me to pick a few more of the Planet Treasures. There has been a series there for a few years, dedicated to all the US states and territories. My oldest unfinished challenge is to find caches with the names of all the states in cache titles. Being the finicky cacher that I am, I insist that I find them organically and not as part of a large series. I’m more than halfway through the challenge and have found some of them in both the most obvious and the most unexpected places. Therefore, I have avoided this series altogether lest I pick up states I hadn’t already found. As fate would have it, some of the caches in the series are regular sized, and all but one of these are for states I’ve already found, so I wouldn’t run afoul of my personal rule.

As always, I managed to find the hard way in. There was a main path that passed close to the cache, but it was having some construction work done. Once I got to the closest point, the perfect place to leave the road, there was a fence between me and the woods. I had to walk a few hundred feet farther down the path to get around the fence, and then a few hundred feet back through the woods to get to the cache. I was a little disappointed to find that the original container had been replaced, from an ammo can to a Lock-n-Lock. But the cache page still showed it as a regular, and victory requires no explanation. Inveni, inscripsi, reposui. I managed, as always, to find the easy way out. Looking over in the opposite direction of the fence, I saw joggers and people with their pets walking along their merry way. Turns out there was a completely open side path about fifty feet from the cache and fifty feet from where I turned onto the fenced walk. I was out and gone in two shakes of the proverbial lamb’s tail.

There are about forty appropriately sized caches within forty miles of home, and I have no doubt there are more options far from my regular hunting grounds. But it does have me thinking: once they get harder and more time limited, what am I gonna do? If they start looking for T5s or something, I may have a chance, thanks to all the pole-based caches around here that I’ve never attempted. But how many friends could I possibly borrow a kayak from? Or maybe they want to encourage hikes, which are not really my thing (though there is some evidence to the contrary). Will I risk having an eternal empty spot because I didn’t do enough at the right time? Can I live with that? Would I even allow it? I guess that’s just one more thing that’s not earth shattering that I’m probably going to devote more brain cycles to (and of course I’m going to overthink it)!