Yesterday I picked up an FTF. The day before I also picked up an FTF. The former one might have been the result of storms that morning; the regular FTF hounds chose to stay home that morning, allowing me to grab it on the way home from work. The latter makes me think that they may be out of town instead (it’s happened). This is tangentially related to my actual subject.
Yesterday, HQ told us that a new set of Treasures would be coming out next month. That’s cool and all, but would you believe that I have two collections still unfinished? The Origami set is over half done but still lacking. The Bird Watching set is barely anywhere. You would think that with their relatively low requirements that I should have scooped them up by now, but no, and that’s for a couple of reasons that may or may not plague more experienced cachers. The first one is obvious: when they dropped, I had found all the qualifying ones in my area. I have long since found most of the low hanging fruit around Austin and a small with 4 or more favorites falls square into that category. I do have the option of finding them when I’m out on the road, but when I’m out finding counties, I’m usually more concerned with getting any cache than with a specific, Treasure qualifying one. Not always though. Some caches are more than worth spending the extra time out there, but usually a cache is a cache is a cache and that’s good enough. The other reason is a little more subtle. A lot of the new caches around Town Lake have the target Scenic View attribute. I’ve even found a good handful of them. Quite a number of the have been FTFs for me. And that’s where I’m tripping over myself. I need Scenic Views with a favorite point, and I’ve either found them long ago before they were needed or am finding them now before they get that first favorite point! Now, I’m sure some of you are thinking “But Atreides, if you awarded it that favorite point when you found it, you’d have an adequate cache!” I would respond that we all know I’m blasé as all get out and am not going to undermine my principles just for a Treasure! You expect me to toss around favorite points willy-nilly merely for my own benefit?
A new collection of Treasures is about to drop and I will probably complete it before I finish the collections I still have sitting around!
Geocaching While Black 