My Proverbial Backyard

A couple of days ago, I went out to get a cache. This is not an earth-shattering revelation. I wasn’t feeling all that great so I wanted to find the easiest one I could find that involved the least effort. That’s hard these days because I’ve gotten pretty much all the LPCs and park & grabs in town and probably most of the surrounding counties (there’s still some that claim to be P&Gs, but I know from experience that they’re actually not). So imagine my surprise to find one that I hadn’t gotten in one of my earliest caching grounds! And it wasn’t a new one filling an unclaimed spot either. It had been there for ten years in the same place as some of my earliest finds, but somehow I had never bothered to go after it. Or maybe I just blanked it out entirely. When I think of all the times I drove out the surrounding towns when I could have just grabbed this one… Of course, that’s the same thinking that used to have me kicking myself for going out and getting a dozen at a time in the olden days instead of saving them and claiming them one by one for the streak I no longer claim to care about.

I love caching. I enjoy the challenge and the new locales and the camaraderie and all that stuff. But lately I’ve been feeling myself dragging about getting out to do it. Part of me is beginning to wonder if it’s because all the low hanging fruit is gone. I don’t mind going after a hard one, but knowing there are so many hard ones around has begun to have an effect on me. They’re hard for different reasons: some are just plain Difficult, others are higher Terrain than I want to (or even can) accomplish, still others are “easy” but really achingly over-hidden. Some days I don’t mind taking on the hard ones, but lately it feels like that’s more of an every day type of thing. Of course, the simple answer is just to stop caching every day. I can tackle the harder ones when I feel up to it and wait for easy ones to repopulate. But that ain’t gonna happen for a number of reasons. I wonder if everyone who does this long enough has this feeling? I wonder if I’ve really been doing it long enough to have this feeling? I should probably stop thinking about it too much. No doubt I won’t have as much time to think about caches if I’m out getting them instead. Besides, I have enough to do from a caching perspective. Who needs to be this existential about it, anyway?