ADVENTURES IN CACHING

Texas Challenge 09

Fredericksburg, TX

This year's Texas Challenge was much different than last year's, both in the individual and collective experience, and in format and style. Now for weeks the weather has been gorgeous and I have been dying to go camping, and go on a wild caching spree. Of course, as Nature would have it (she is such a bitch), it turned nasty and cold the weekend of this much anticipated event. There were a lot of cold cachers out there (172 logged the event last I looked)!

I planned on caching on the way out there on the five hour drive or so from northwest Houston, but the very first one I stopped at, it just got me pissed off and not wanting to cache. It was so cold and the rain was just biting into me, and I took one look and said "&^%$ this!"
Luckily for us (me), the rain let up when we hit the other side of San Antonio. I was able to grab a handful of caches around Blanco, off 281, before Ted reined me in and said we had to get going. (My favorite one was Kokopelli's Hangout. It is a really cool area and I am glad we stopped there.)

We had to get to the campsite in enough time to check in, pitch our tent, get situated, and then we had to get down the road to go to an event nearby, in the little town of Luckenbach. Don't tell me you don't know the song! (If you do, sing along...let's go to Luckenbach Texas, with Waylon and Willie and the boys). Here are my boys outside the old post office, converted to a country store with a bar in the back (smoking area only). Around the corner was a dance hall with live music, and a little feed shack to buy some food. Elisa bought me a beer while we were here and we looked for a cache together. I really wanted to spend more time with her but both of us had our families pulling us different directions.

Last year I took my oldest son to the Challenge, and he and I camped it. This year, we went as a family and took our new tent our friends Mari and Todd gave us for Christmas. Boy was it cold! The first night the wind about blew our tent away. I saw vacancies at the local hotels and kept trying to convince Ted we should reconsider our accomodations, but he was insistent that we camp.

When I went last year, it was the sixth Annual Challenge based on a system that had worked over the years, but had generated a lot of geographic rivalry. Last year, there were a lot of disgruntled cachers, particularly from our area, seeing as that our last (or was it third?) place ammo can was kicked over to us instead of being treated with respect. Many people also felt the scoring was sketchy. There was talk of torn chads like you hadn't seen since Bush's brother helped him with the election....

This year, "Mrs Captain Picard", aka Julie, along with several Central Texas cachers, organized a different kind of Challenge. You could enter the competitive event, which previously was the only event, or you could choose to do "casual caching". The Challenge Hide Team hid around seventy caches all around Fredericksburg and surrounding areas. For each one that you found, you stamped a card, and when you returned that afternoon, you received a ticket for each stamp. The competitive challenge was not based region to region (usually we have four: North, Southeast, Central, or West) but team to team, with divisions for coed versus single sex teams and different age brackets. This competition was held at Enchanted Rock, which is a beautiful big dome shaped rock (technically an exfoilation dome) in a scenic spot in the Hill Country of Texas. Instead of my doing the competitive cache with other SE Tx cachers, the four of us did the casual caching together.

The town of Fredericksburg itself has its charms. It is an old German town that stood by its roots and still has a Main Street filled with unique stores that caters now to a tourist crowd who come to enjoy E Rock, German food, antique shopping, and wineries. This sleepy hamlet, albeit Spring Break and German festivals, boasts to be America's #2 Wine Destination. It also hosts fascinating eateries, such as the original Porky's restaurant, at which we took this photo at the end of the casual caching.

My husband kept telling me about this awesome pulled pork sandwich he had there about two months ago when doing more processing of soldiers for upcoming deployments. I wanted to check it out, but when we got there, I had to order a cheeseburger instead of the pulled pork. He says I was missing out, but really I had missed out the night before, because I didn't realize the Luckenbach "feed shack" was cash only, and we were only able to get chili dogs and water with the dollars we had on us.

Now, my caching experience was not what I thought it would be, but it turned out all right. Originally, my friend Elisa and I were going to ditch the guys at a fishing hole with a child, and take the other child caching with us. We were going to hit it! Unfortunately, the weather did not favor that plan. ):

It was blustery and cold that first morning, the morning of the Challenge, so instead of cooking a hot breakfast over the grill that we planned, we all piled in the car to head into town for some kolaches...Now if there is one thing I love about German food working its way into Texas consciousness, it's the kolache!

So we were all in the car and I was texting Elisa, but she didn't get my message until she was at the campsite looking for me. She had to come there to pick up her card anyway, but I felt bad about missing her. By the time she called me, we were finding our first cache of the day.

We spent the day driving all around the town hunting caches. My plan for maximizing our cache find went out the window with the change of plans to go with our families instead of us girls. We managed to find a lot right in the town before the kids started insisting on going to a park. We decided to deviate from the Challenge caches and go after two non-Challenge caches there in town that were at a park. When we did this, I realized that the little one's diaper had gotten wet and leaked out all over both the pairs of pants he was wearing (we were all layered with clothing due to the forty degree temperature outside).

I had new diapers with us but not new pants, so we decided to go back to the campsite and regroup. This took about half an hour out of our day and really threw us off our rhythm. After this interruption, we headed south instead of north to town, and started grabbing some of the caches "off the beaten path" on back roads. The back roads made Ted nostalgic for his hometown and he started going on and on about how much he hates living in the city and we should get a place in the country. Our route led us to many wineries (the Hide Team hid a bunch outside these places), and once he started wine tasting to pass the time while I hunted the cache, he got even more nostalgic.

Some of the caches were hidden outside old school houses from earlier last century. These were double ticket items, in an attempt to generate more visits to them. At one of the ones like this we stopped at, an elderly German lady who went to school there as a child had some treats out and gave us tours, telling us stories about her days there at the school and what life was like for her growing up in the area.

At our last cache of the day, I ran into some friends of mine from back home who had done the competitive Challenge that morning. They were out hitting casual caches now, but they were very worn out! These women are also my friends on Facebook, which has turned out to be a good vehicle to get to know people better. At this stop, there was also a lady who was videotaping people finding the cache for a documentary she was doing.

By the time we finished eating at Porky's, it was time to turn in our cards at the pavilion near the campsite. It seemed like everyone in my family was ready to take a nap now except for me. I wanted to be there to see what was going to happen next. We put the twenty three tickets we had earned in the raffle. I was hoping to end up with the grand prize, a weekend getaway at a Bed and Breakfast there in Fredericksburg, but my friend Joy won that instead. We ended up with a duffel bag, some kitty cat tiles, and a couple kids toys. I am sure Julie did not plan on spending hours up there on stage giving away prizes, but there were just so many of them! It made everyone feel like a winner to get something.

They actually had to put the raffle on hold to get to the rest of the event, which was announcing winners of the creative cache contest, and then the main event, announcing the winning teams from the competition earlier. To everyone's surprise (most of all, the four people on the team), one of our teams won their division! This team was comprised of three fellas and a girl that actually I met about a couple months ago, right after she moved to the area, and encouraged to come to a local event, where I introduced her to one of the other guys (my attempt at matchmaking), who invited her to come play with them this weekend. It was exciting for me to see them then go on to win the prize together, which was the geocoin minted for the Challenge on a necklace.

The whole weekend, what was so amazing to me is that I didn't hear a single complaint. Not about the scoring, not about the way things were run, about the organization, nothing. Well, maybe the weather. It astounded me and I think was a testament to how well this year's Challenge Team did at planning. There was no regional animosity, and I think that was a benefit of moving to the different format. I hope they keep this format in the future.

As for us, we made it through the weekend without anyone freezing to death. We got about 39 caches for the trip, which was a decent amount. It is actually an amazing number when you consider that my husband who has about a four cache limit was with us, and we got an average of 13 caches for the three days we were doing this. We got another handful of finds on the way back, until we went after one in Sequin that not only was off the beaten path but was a tough micro to boot. We didn't find it but we lost a lot of time, and suddenly all caching was halted so we could make it back home in a timely fashion.

We made it through a weekend camping with a fight or an injury, so I am pretty happy about that. The children all said they had fun and are interested in camping again, which I am also happy about. I think that anyone who didn't go this year because of previous year's experiences really missed out. It was actually a really great time.