First to Find, Last to Find

I mentioned in a previous installment putting together lists of geocaches to attempt to find while taking a trip on the road. The better half and I planned a trip to see her mother in San Antonio in the middle of August, so, I made a short list of caches I wanted to go after while out on the road.

My itinerary was not as ambitious as had been previous efforts. My first really big cache hunt came about on a trip to go see Mount Rushmore with the kids and the first wife in tow. By the time we finished that trip, we had found caches in at least half a dozen states, including “Mingo” (one of the oldest caches still active in the United States), a letterbox cache at the foot of the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, and my first “First to Find” cache, the “Nebraska Sand Hills Rest and Rattle.”

“First to Find” caches can be (and for that matter still are) special. Here locally, in the area around my little corner of the Dallas/Fort Worth Metromess, there seem to be several cachers who appear to try and locate new caches almost as soon as they pop up on the pages of Geocaching.com. For the record, no complaints from me, although I have caught little rumbles from others who resent the enterprising cachers.

“Nebraska Sand Hills…” was found by the family at least five days after being published – and no one else bothered to find the cache until several weeks after I finally logged the find a week and a half after the actual discovery. It was my proudest “FTF”, but certainly not my last. There were many caches I’ve encountered with an empty log book.

Back to the trip to San Antonio.

I decided that I would attempt only three caches. Two on the way, and one on Tuesday morning close to where the mother-in-law lives.

The first attempt was made in Abbott Texas, birthplace of Willie Nelson. I looked at the description of the cache and saw a clue as to where it might be. I didn’t load the cache into the GPSr, deciding to try to find the cache “naked” (without using the GPSr). The turn-off from the Interstate was easy enough, and the town itself was just as easily found. However, the “spoiler” (a hint given away to help cachers find what they were looking for) had me looking for a structure which wasn’t there. We drove through town, waved at the people going to church on that Sunday morning, and then got back on the road to try and make time.

No biggie. We get down to San Antonio from time to time, so, no love lost.

The second cache I attempted was at the Buccee’s just north of Temple. For my readers not living in Texas, Buccee’s has been described as the largest convenience store in the world. There’s a chain of them spread along the Interstate, offering fuel, food, and the cleanest restrooms you will ever find anywhere. To give you an idea on just how big a Buccee’s is, well, imagine something the size of a typical medium-sized grocery store. The lot is so big that cachers have been able to place 3 caches on the property in Temple and not violate Geocaching.com’s rule that caches must be placed at least 500 feet apart.

The better half and I planned on this being nothing more than a pit stop, so, I pre-selected just one of the three caches on the property and parked Willy the Jeep near where I thought the cache would be. While the other half went to use the facility, I quickly fed the coordinates for the cache into the GPSr and found that I was about 200 feet away from the target. The hint told me that the cache I was looking for was a “Lift A Skirt” (under the cover at the bottom of a light pole hiding the bolts holding the lamp in place).

A bit too easy, I thought. I might have gone ahead and tried to find the cache in the third pole in my line of sight, had it not been for the rain and wind which had just started. Well, that and the fact that I still had to use the facility myself. And the fact that I had to buy the obligatory bag of “Beaver Nuggets” (sugar coated hull-less popcorn. “Only sugar has more sugar”). Took about five minutes to do what needed to be done before heading on down the Interstate.

We arrived at the Alamo City none the worse for the wear. We headed directly to see my in-laws (mother, father and brother) before having dinner and heading back to our hotel.

There was a restless night in an underwhelming hotel, followed by breakfast with the brother-in-law and his girlfriend outdoors in a picnic area next to the swimming pool. I told Steve (my brother-in-law) a little bit about geocaching and he agreed to go with me on a hunt to find the one geocache I had loaded into the GPSr.

“Thirty-Two, Forty-Three” was listed as a micro-cache located about half a mile from the Tobin Trail head adjacent to Interstate 410 north of downtown San Antonio. Steve and I needed the walk, and we combined that walk with some pleasant conversation. When we got close to “Ground Zero”, we found numerous places where a cache might be hidden. We noted more than a few little frogs in the immediate vicinity. Steve told me a story about an incident he had with a frog when he was quite young… I eased his mind by recalling a line from Monty Python (“… if we took the bones out it wouldn’t be crunchy, now would it?) and we kept searching.

Finally, I found the cache, or what were the remains of the cache, out in the open about 20 feet from where the GPSr said it would be. I went ahead and added a portion of the card I had used to write the cache coordinates as my attempt to log it and then moved on with the remainder of the hike and the day.

My spouse and I went home on Tuesday. I went ahead and logged my fine on Wednesday morning. Shortly after logging “Thirty-Two, Forty-Three,” I got a notification that the cache had been archived, or withdrawn by the cache owner, making me the “Last to Find” the cache.

No rewards from Geocaching.com. No satisfaction of making a new discovery, although there could be some satisfaction derived from being the last person to find a cache before it was withdrawn.

For me, it was find #989. Eleven caches to go before #1,000.

Be Seeing You!