I’ve Got A Little List

A little while ago, I was looking through some challenges I had signed but hadn’t completed. One of them seemed simple enough: find a Wherigo in every month of the year. Surprisingly, I hadn’t found one in June or December. I set up a couple of reminders to alert me when the times came. Hence, I’ve had a calendar alert bugging me for the last few weeks. Yesterday was finally the time to do something about it. I had found (surprisingly, I might add) a Wherigo that I had gotten final coordinates for but had never gone to get so I made the drive out to neighboring Hutto and took a walk in a park. The location of the container seemed pretty obvious, but I had hoped I was wrong. A wasp’s nest had formed on the fence next to it, teeming with little flying daggers, and I wanted to avoid it at all costs since I’d left my WD-40 in the car at the other end of the park (and yes, WD-40 is great against wasps). I checked out a couple of other possible spots near GZ, but I couldn’t avoid the inevitable. I came close to the nest to peer down a pipe and there it was. Kneeling down took me away from the danger as I reached in and pulled it out. Another cache bit the dust. Now all I have to do is wait until December and maybe I can take one of these seemingly numberless unfulfilled challenges off the list.

All the time I was avoiding getting stung, though, I was thinking about another cache. It was a Mystery near Marble Falls in Burnet County. Fun fact: its falls are no longer visible, obscured under water behind a dam. Every few years when the water levels are low enough they and their natural lake can be seen, but with all the rain we’ve gotten the last couple of weeks, not this year. Anyway, I was thinking about the Mystery for two reasons. The first was considering what I had to do to solve it. I had to spend hours solving a series of nested Jigidi puzzles to get the final coords. The second was because I had forgotten why I had gone through all that trouble for that specific cache. Why would I care about a specific Mystery 35 miles away? As I walked away from the wasps and the Wherigo, it finally occurred to me: because it started with an X! Another of those seemingly numberless unfulfilled challenges (the second oldest one, actually) is an alphanumeric Mystery challenge and I’m only missing two letters, of which X is one. Now all I have to do is find one stating with Z and I’m golden! There’s only three in Texas. One is a puzzle that doesn’t make sense and one is a challenge I’ll never complete, so I guess I’ll have to go to San Antonio for another challenge I’ve already accomplished!