After months of trying, I finally got around to something I’ve been wanting to do for some time. I was down a daughter since my younger was part of a play competition outside of Dallas, so my older daughter (the jacket thief) and I went out to grab a couple, one for her, one for me, both away from L-Town.
For her, we got a Letterbox Hybrid. She’s been wanting one for a while and, oddly enough, there isn’t one in Longview. Luckily, there are a bunch outside of nearby Kilgore. Most of them are part of a trail and are functionally ungettable unless you have a GPS file for the entire run (I know people with it, but I didn’t feel like making anyone go into the vault for it). There’s also a series of them devoted to the twelve days of Christmas. We went ahead and got the sixth day since it had been recently found. We almost didn’t get it, but we managed to dig under enough pine needles to claim our quarry. Good for us.
For me, however, we had a different goal. I’ve mentioned in the past that I’ve never been especially intent on completing Jasmer, primarily because it was pointless unless I got one of the four August 2000 caches. That issue went away when I traveled to Cumming. I was left with only a couple of months unclaimed so I figured I might as well go ahead and finish it up. For the older month (November 2000) there’s only one cache in Texas that fits the bill so I expect I’ll be making a trip up to Denton at some point (unless I want to go after the oldest in either Minnesota, Indiana, or New Jersey instead [signs point to NO]). But for January 2004, I had plenty of options spread around the state. The two best ones were at a state park an hour north of home and another about 45 minutes from Longview. I’ve wanted to go after the Longview one on several occasions, but something would always crop up and prevent me from going. Well, Saturday there was nothing stopping us from going. The cache was on the back side of the sports complex section of a large park. I figured it would be easy enough to get in, grab it, and get out with no muss, fuss, or other considerations of any kind. I knew I was wrong when I pulled into to find the parking lost jammed up with cars. On the closer fields, there were kids playing soccer and the attendant parents watching, cheering, and generally egging them on. On the farther fields, the boys of summer were making themselves known in the spring. So much baseball! And so many parents, again watching, cheering, and egging. Had I been alone, I would have aborted the entire endeavor. Yes, I, as a member of the public, get to use the park for walking too, but I wouldn’t want to be around so many kids and parents, especially as a stranger. Luckily, I had my own child with me who was not too much older than the ones in attendance. The two of us were less conspicuous, even when we had to walk around a baseball team preparing for a game to get to the back of their diamond. Once we walked around the fence, we set off into the woods beyond for a bit. Once we got the GZ, the cache only took a moment to find. I puzzled how to get it out of the log it was placed in, but my she had a better vantage and saw the wire that made it easy to pull out. Invenimus, inscripsimus, reposuimus. And a well used walking trail led us out of the woods and back through the park. Had we not been lazy, that is. We returned the way we had come instead, around the back of the diamond, past the game in progress, through all the parents and throngs, taking the shortest way back to the car.
I was all up in my disdain for the muggles (though HQ wants us to move away from that term because it’s exclusionary, which I get but obviously don’t always adhere to), but I also remembered that they were there supporting their children. How am I going to judge someone for that?
Geocaching While Black 