The Ants Go Marching

No, I haven’t been to a Spanish Geotour that started and ended a year into my geocaching career. You see, many years ago when I lost a car, I was bus bound and did a lot of caching in town. Since my car is going to be down for a bit (my mechanic is booked up, so I can’t get into him until next week), I decided to fall back on the old method of travel (in between the occasional Uber, that is) so yesterday after work, I jumped on a bus and went downtown for a cache. That was a little bit of a challenge because they had changed a number of things since I last seriously rode, including the app used, some of the routes, and the prices charged. That said, one interesting change I noticed is that you could rent an electric bike through the bus app for a day for a very reasonable amount of money, which opens up some interesting possibilities involving bike caching, but that might be a topic for another day.

As I was saying, I took a bus downtown. I managed to both scope out a couple of possible new cache locations as I was waiting for buses and see a car accident, a truck almost perfectly T-boning an SUV. I’d forgotten the craziness that you can see when you don’t have to focus on driving. As you can imagine, I’ve pretty much cached out anything in Travis County that could be considered simple. I frequently go to neighboring towns and counties to grab caches. However, in the last year, a cacher living in more southerly climes has been placing new caches along the running paths of Town Lake (no, I still don’t call it Ladybird Lake). I’ve grabbed a couple of them before, and I decided to go get another one. As I rode, I checked out the recent logs. The cacher before me logged it as a DNF because there were too many ants around the place at GZ where you had to reach in and feel around. When I finally got to GZ, a bridge going over to a small platform on the river (the “lake” is really a dammed-off river) after dodging some rush hour traffic, I stood at the edge of the bridge and watched the trails of ants marching both east and west, parallel to the riverbank. I wasn’t sure I’d want to reach in either. But I wasn’t going to go find another cache, either. Not when I was so close. I decided to put technology to the task. I pulled out my phone, activated the camera, and used it to look around inside without having to touch anything. Once I spotted the cache, I reached in once, quickly and away from the ant highway, and pulled it out. Victory! Inveni, inscripsi, reposui. And with that, I started heading back towards home. Another day, another cache.