Saturday was an active day. In anticipation of Texas Challenge, we’ve been hiding new caches for our expected visitors. We took an opportunity to make some more … challenging hides. For a while, we’ve been going through challenges all over the United States, looking for interesting ones that we don’t have here in Texas. A bunch of those along with a bunch of more “normal” challenges should make for a decent challenge trail, giving options for both newer cachers who haven’t done anything crazy like visit all fifty states or cache in ten countries and more experienced cachers who have done exactly those crazy things. But you have to have containers for them so we went out placing them.
A dozen of us from Austin and San Antonio gathered. We divided ourselves into five cars, each car with a big ol’ bag of cap-and-caps. We were given maps and each car was assigned one section. And with that, we began driving the back roads of Texas looking for places to hide them. My car was peopled by two other members of the TexaSix, friends of the site Razorbackgirl and Krissy4884.
We prowled the sides of the roads, looking for good spots to place hides. We split up into three main roles, Razorbackgirl driving, Krissy4884 preparing containers (and making sure they had logs), myself doing paperwork (recording coordinates and location information). We began by taking turns jumping out to make hides but by the end our stalwart driver was doing the jumping, taking all the extra steps for daily fitness goals and such. At first, our job was easy: we had trees and fencepost corners that would serve well to hide and hang things. On one section of road, things were harder. While I’m all about updating roadways, one stretch of state highway had been recently relaid and redirected, making for a better driving experience, but leaving fewer places where we could make hides. Instead of placing them as close as we could to 528 feet (OK, we weren’t quite that exact most of the time), we sometimes had to go a quarter mile or more in some spots to make reasonable hides. Once we turned off the highway back onto the side roads, hiding became much easier again. Out of the fifty containers we were provided, we ended up placing forty of them. Once the final list of challenges is decided on, they will be assigned one by one to all of our containers. And, of course, we’ll be making more trips out to hide things Traditionals, Letterboxes, Multis, and other caches all around the area. We all want to make sure there’s stuff to keep cachers entertained!
Once we were done with our hiding for the day and had lunch, Razorbackgirl and I split off for another caching project. There was an Adventure Lab series devoted to traditional Czech painted churches so we took a little trip out to see them since they were so close. I’m not religious by nature, but I am a sucker for some attractive architecture. Our first visit was a bit of a bust: the information we needed to answer the Lab was there, but the building itself had been destroyed a few years before in a gas explosion. The rest were lovely. I didn’t know about the Czech tradition of decorating their church interiors, so a pink church or a ceiling populated with painted stars or music playing angels was unexpected. The interior of one of them was described as being like a Faberge egg. It did not disappoint. When we arrived at one of them, we were at the tail end of a wedding. We avoided entering that church lest we interfere with the wedding pictures, but in the end we were invited to join the party at the reception! We demurred because we were on a mission (and joining a wedding reception of people we didn’t know seemed weird). Along with the painting and decoration, I learned of an interesting way the paint was used. Apparently, churches back in the old country were festooned with marble. Texas, however, isn’t known for its marble deposits. So the painters emulated marble by painting wooden columns and altars white and using turkey feathers to apply veins and striations.
Of course, all good things come to an end. We had to get back home because we have lives and families and all that stuff. But it was a lovely day out. We did some work and we did some play. What could be better than that?
Geocaching While Black 