My daily cache took me downtown. I’m lucky enough to get off of work early enough that going downtown is not the nightmare one would think it would be. That said, even in the best of circumstances, it can be a pain. I decided to grab one of the newer caches around here, one devoted to and named after legendary country singer songwriter and all around nice guy Willie Hugh Nelson. I knew that they were going to be a lot of muggles (yes, HQ, I am sometimes the victim of outmoded thinking) about. The location is near a statue of him and that is out front of a music venue/event center. There’s almost always something going on there in some form of fashion, and this time it was some kind of tech exposition or symposium. When I got to GZ, I was almost completely surrounded by folks wearing business casual, all with similar name badges. I couldn’t immediately tell where the cache was; all I knew was that it was supposed to be hidden in plain sight. The fact that the coordinates kept jumping around didn’t help matters. I spent a moment watching humanity swirling around the statue with me and then took a seat on a nearby bench where some of them were looking at their phones and others were smoking (because that’s the thing that still happens in the day and age). I seemed just slightly out of place, but that is pretty much who I am. I feel like a stranger no matter where I go, which has both advantages and disadvantages. In this case, I was just another stranger along with so many, and while my attire did not quite match theirs, I did not stand out as much as one I think. I went ahead and looked at the hint and saw that it was magnetic. That cut down the number of hiding places, but not by much. With this new information, I meandered around for a few minutes more until I noticed something silver that didn’t quite match the silver it was attached to. I immediately began to envision how I might stealthy bend over and grab it so that I might not garner any attention. Then I remembered: we were all strangers there. If I have learned anything, it is that people care about you a lot less than you might think, especially if they are not personally attached to the location in some significant way. I stood near a mass of people, and just bent over and grabbed it. I returned to the benches and took a moment to sign the log. Whoever printed it was cute; several spots had notes or instructions about what the person signing there should do. My spot said that I should give it a favorite point. What neither the cache owner nor the log printer could’ve possibly known is that, while I’m not oppositionally defiant or anything, I ain’t gotta do [BLANK]. And besides, I am far too blasé for that anyway. The cache was not that impressive. And I gave the CO a favorite point last week so he got my favor at least once already! Once I was done with it, I walked over next to a different clutch of conferencers in the same place and put it back from whence it came. And nobody else cared. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.
Geocaching While Black 