A City Of Stars

Sunday morning, I drove out to Dripping Springs, a small town outside of Austin that has over the last decade and change become a bedroom community for the city. Consequently, development has made it feel less like a small town of forty-six hundred people and more like a small (dare I say minuscule?) city, especially with the giant suburbs that have been built around it. For much longer than most of that development has been around, I’ve been going out there to see friends of mine and that day was little different. I decided to go out to Dripping Springs early so I could grab my daily cache. I don’t usually have to go all the way out there (my friends live on the way into town) so I don’t see the place that often. A while back, I went out to get a certain cache to try to complete a 360 degree circle around home, but failed to get it the last time and didn’t fell like going out yesterday, so I stayed in town.

I ended up choosing a simple Multi-cache at the town Veterans’ Memorial, but I also noticed that there was an Adventure Lab sitting smack dab on top of it as well. That’s when I noticed something else that was new to me. I have seen a city of pigs, a city of boots, horses, squirrels, hearts, and scotties (among other things) but this was my first city of stars!

In 2014, Dripping Springs was the first place in Texas named as a dark sky community by the International Dark Sky Association. I’m a little surprised that Marfa or somewhere in Jeff Davis County wasn’t first because of McDonald Observatory, but that’s neither here nor there. All that mattered is that in 2024, to celebrate the town’s designation, Dripping Springs started placing stars all around town. One of the Adventure Labs was there at the Veteran’s Memorial and two more were at other stars withing five minutes drive. A fourth one was a little out of the way, but the last one was on the way to my friends’ house. I had time to spare, so why not! Once I completed the Multi, I spent some time driving around from star to star. A couple of them were familiar locations. The farther out one was at a park that the Girls and I had found an astronomically-oriented Earthcache at a year and a half before. The final one was at a local distillery I had found a cache at about a year before, I think. I drove from star to star, pulling into the geofences, and then answering questions. They were all simple enough and soon the entire Lab was done with time to spare. Dark skies are a good enough reason for Adventure Labs in my book so kudos to the CO!