ADVENTURES IN CACHING
Austin (Part 3)
This day was not that productive in terms of geocaching. It had a lot to do with children not wanting to get up in the morning. I didn't get them out of the hotel until after nine. We had plans to go straight to Diane's house, an old friend I have reconnected with over Facebook. She and her husband just bought a house on the north side of town, and invited us over for blueberry pancakes and poached pears this morning.
In typical fashion, I was late and harried, and the children were all over the place. I really wanted to get deeper into a conversation Diane, Geoff, Carrie and I were having about art, legacy, and humanity, but the children were making it very difficult. They had found the hole in her backyard fence and were trying to turn the gas pipe into a gun.
So we left, and headed first to Wooten Park to find a cache and play on the playground, and then to an area I had been eyeing on the map, Covert Park, or the Mount Bonnell. This summit was tucked back in a neighborhood with nice houses, big hills, and nice views, and is where I imagined the Hollywood stars who come to Austin have their houses.
It was a short hike (0.15 from the trailhead or thereabouts) up a rocky trail that led to a summit and overlook area. The summit was a virtual cache, and there was a traditional cache off a side trail. The children kept wanting to walk closer to the edge, in typical fashion. The oldest one walks right into danger and the little one follows him. It's a pattern I'd like stopped.
However, the view was very appealing. We liked looking down at the houses below. We kept getting surprised with how grand and impressive they were. All had cute little boathouses built on the waters edge, with shiny fancy boats bobbing around inside. In our minds, we imagined living inside a house like that, or what the people were liked that lived there, or how fun it would be to be riding those boats. We watched the boats zip by and imagined the fun in luxury.
After this two cache adventure, we took a trail shortcut that took us right to where our truck was parked, but on a higher terrain level. As I debating on who to send first down the rocky edge at the last six feet or so, a woman I had seen picnicking earlier offered to help me, and helped hoist Kaleb down, which made things a lot easier for me. This offering of kindness from a stranger really touched me.
Then we started making our way back to Camp Mabry to exchange vehicles with my husband, but on the way, realized we were close to another geocache I really wanted to get. This one was called "Art Star" and was at the Laguna Gloria art museum.
It was a very interesting place. We walked from a studio down a paved trail along a large body of water - a cove of some sort. The local flora was more like Florida than Texas, all large-leaved wet plants and a general mugginess. This may just have been the impending rain and resulting moisture. Lights were strung along trees and over benches decorated in whimsical artistic fashion.
The little one was starting to get tired, and of course asked to be carried the whole way (which, at about 0.30 mile round trip walk over varied terrain, was not something I enjoyed nor would constantly do, which led to meltdowns).
We eneded up in a grassy area surrounded by woods. In the middle of the grassy area stood this piece.
The cache page suggested you bring a piece of art to trade in the cache, and we had brought some drawings done in colored pencil by the boys while we were at Diane's. In the end, we decided not to trade our drawings. We took a back way out, which led to the rear of the main house, with statues surrounding a waterfall. I really enjoyed the scenery around here and would have enjoyed the whole thing more if the toddler hadn't been clinging to me the whole time.
After this, I had some kind of meltdown when my husband and I traded out cars. I was hormonal, tired, hungry, irritated, lost, confused, and generally stressed out. I did feel better after having a cry about it.
After that, we ended up at a park that no one wanted to leave. It was just a small playground area with a cache nearby, and a limestone kiln to look at and check out. However, despite being a diminutive area, it helped calm down our trip in powerful ways.
After this, we drove around Austin one more time. There were many, many caches to be gotten, but I didn't feel like doing any of the, and we checked out the river from near the Congress Street bridge before moving out, doing a few little cultural type geocaches on the way out of town. There was an ABC Challenge going on in Central Austin and we did some recently placed in a cemetary involving the rare letters of "Y" and "X".
Heading out of Austin back towards Spring, we managed to find several more short quick geocaches, bringing the day's total to 13. A decent number, but nothing compared to the find counts of some of those at the top of the game. Thirty for our trip, though, which brought us ahead a couple notches on the geocacher rankings. We saw a lot of cool places we never knew about, and experienced the town and surrounding areas while here geocaching, and it is something I would do again and again.