Don’t tell anyone, but Monday was my birthday. I don’t usually do anything special for it; I don’t consider it anything more than another day for most purposes. Under normal circumstances, I would have just gone to work. But when I got a call from Razorbackgirl asking if I wanted to go grab some caches, I said yes. She needed some letterboxes for a challenge she’s working on and I, well, just needed a day out on the road. We got a bunch of Challenges down in Medina and Frio counties earlier this year, but we didn’t touch the letterbox series nearby. So, to avoid as much metro traffic as possible, we left Austin early, heading south.
The first part of the series was mostly fine. There were a few DNFs and some cracked containers, victims of the Texas heat, but for the most part they were in good shape. A few of them were a bit closer to private property than we would have liked. A couple of them were over fencelines. One of them in particular was in full view of the landowner’s house and the arrow slit windows offered excellent possibilities for sniping at trespassers in air-conditioned comfort. As you can imagine, we chose to forego that one. We also skipped out on the one with the hint (and I quote) “tree climb holy moly.” I was tall enough to get low tree climbs. She was nimble enough to get higher ones. “Holy moly” heights, however, were well beyond our abilities or desires. After taking on the first leg, we turned onto a second leg of the series and were mostly disappointed. A lot of the caches along that stretch were DNFs. We suspected that a landowner had pulled them from along their fenceline because several of them should have been no problem considering our combined experience. And yet, despite that combined experience, we were weak. The sun, while nowhere as bad as it could have been, was taking its toll on us and the DNFs disheartened us a bit. Add in that it was starting to get close to lunch time and the nearest restaurant was easily fifteen miles away. We decided to call it for the moment and head back to San Antonio for lunch.
But that was no reason to not grab some challenges on the way back. Those were easier to find, bisons instead of crumbling 35mm canisters, and most of the ones we found were easy enough for us to claim. Get one on every date in June? I haven’t missed a day in seven years so I’m good. Find caches in 400 counties? Get outta here! A couple were surprising. Find an entire loop only on days in April? I was only one D/T short. Find 3000 of three different attributes and 4000 of a fourth? Not even close!
Once we hit the city, we opted for a truly experimental lunch, Tex-Mex on the Riverwalk. I actually don’t eat a lot of Tex-Mex these days because it’s so ubiquitous here, so it was a nice change of pace. There’s a series of Adventure Labs along the Riverwalk so we took a walk to get a few and, more importantly, pick up some inner city EarthCaches.
One of them took me for a lesson on sandstone back to somewhere I haven’t been since my first year, the Bexar County Courthouse. The others led to a lovely statue with a lesson on basalt and the City Hall and the San Antonio milestone with a lesson on granite. At this point, I feel like I have a degree in granite thanks to EarthCaches. And with those done, we braved I-35 one last time and headed home.
All in all, I give the day an A. The caching was mostly good, the company was excellent, and my mood definitely got a boost. Five stars, would definitely do again.
Geocaching While Black 