Atreides Family Robinson

It all started on Saturday morning. Normally, I’ll just visit the Girls in L-Town on Saturday, but they were supposed to come down to Austin this weekend. Unfortunately, my youngest had a school performance on Friday night when they would normally be on the way down. I couldn’t switch weekends because she had to come down for a concert on Saturday night. So I figured out how to make it work: I drove up on Friday afternoon, which gave me the chance to catch the performance as well, and then brought the Girls back to Austin on Saturday morning. Of course, since we were traveling during the day, it offered a good opportunity to pick up a couple of counties that my older daughter hadn’t been to for the Texas County Challenge yet.

We started out on Freestone County in a cemetery (there always is one). We were chasing a Multicache placed near the gravestones of the CO’s great-grandparents. We needed information from the stones to get to final coordinates and once we arrived at the real GZ, we found a bison tube with a lizard guardian. All of a sudden, neither of the Girls was keen on pulling out the cache. My hand, on the other … hand, didn’t fit in the hidey hole and I really didn’t want to disturb the little lizard dude so we went back to the car, grabbed a magnet-on-a-stick, and used it to pull out the bison without touching the guardian. He scampered off as soon as we put the stick in so I guess he knew that his mission had failed. The log was quickly signed and returned, making for our first cache of the day. We stopped for a Traditional soon after on a fenceline outside a farmhouse. I’m not a fan of front yard caches, but the description said that the home owner had allowed it (I should hope so! A birdhouse cache is hard to keep secret), so we grabbed it and were done with the county.

In neighboring Limestone County, we stopped in Mexia, again at a cemetery with both a Traditional and a Mystery contained therein. The Traditional was another birdhouse cache of the same style as the previous one from the same CO, but was placed with a different thought process in mind.

This one had been placed next to the final resting place of the CO’s dog. As you can imagine, it was the most favorited cache in the county. I was a little surprised to find that a normal cemetery had allowed a pet interment, but I shouldn’t have been considering I’ve seen them before in a number of places. This also gave us the opportunity to examine the particulars of the Mystery.

I got the unexpected opportunity to add another famous grave to my list, that of Country Hall of Fame inductee Cindy Walker. I’m not exactly a country fan, but it turned out that I was quite familiar with several of her songs, especially Bubbles in My Beer and Dream Baby. It also made me examine an aspect of famous graves that I hadn’t considered before: how would I feel about a grave of someone I didn’t know and felt no particular interest in? In this case, Walker happened to have written some songs I know and enjoyed, but what if she had only written things I didn’t care about? Would I have even noted it? Had I gone to that certain cemetery in Atlanta, I would have noted Bobby Jones even though I have zero interest in golf and Margaret Mitchell even though I have certain problems with her most famous work. I’ve run into the graves of other people who turned out to be famous and I just didn’t care about them or the source of their fame and said nothing. The question may require more thought, but that wasn’t important at that moment. We pulled the important information off her gravestone (visually obfuscated in the photo) and then repositioned to another part of the cemetery to find a bison hanging in a tree. Credit where credit is due to my younger daughter, she was the one that spotted the silver bison that somehow her sister and I had missed. With these two caches in one location we were done with the county.

Finally, we stopped in nearby Falls County. We had long ago gotten a Traditional in the county but needed a Nontraditional to finish it out. There was a Mystery there I had solved a while back and since we were passing through anyway, it presented the perfect opportunity to grab it and finish the county. Credit where credit is due to my older daughter, if it had been a snake it would have bitten me but she found it quickly and easily as I was working my way down a guardrail. It was in a place that was so easy that I didn’t think to check it. Inveniet, inscripsimus, reposui. That done, we headed back to Austin to do our thing.

Sunday, I had to return them to their mother. We met at a halfway mark to do a handoff, but on the way we stopped to find a cache at the Franklin County Courthouse. There was a nano on the grounds that was new to me (I hadn’t stopped there since the first time in 2018) so we grabbed it easily enough. And once the handoff was made, I stopped there again on the way back home to grab some Adventure Labs on the the grounds as well. And with that (and returning home), a long-driving weekend (for certain values of “long”) was finally completed. Six hundred miles with no new counties to show for it… Yes, my little girls are worth it, but that’s still Austin to Jackson or Springfield or almost Memphis. That could have been the start of a serious adventure!