Originally Published November 23, 2009

The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department kicked off a challenge to the state's geocachers on November 1. They placed caches in 12 locations to stimulate interest in the parks and historical sites. The goal was to get people exploring the nature and history of this great state and from our perspective it was a booming success.

My wife and I visited all 12 cache sites on the weekend of November 14th and 15th. We were able to log 11 of the 12 caches, the 12th had been lost or stolen a few days before our roadtrip. TPWD's log entry said that if we had been to the site while it was missing we could include it in our count but I could not tolerate an asterisk by my name in the permanent record. So we scampered back to the Guadalupe River State Park on the 21st to punch, log and claim the final cache in the challenge.

A reasonable person is probably wondering "Why the rush to get them in a single weekend?". One little line in the challenge web page reads "The first 100 returned passports receive a commemorative Texas Geocache Challenge coin" and that's enough to motivate some people (including my better half) to git 'er done, right now. We would have eventually visited all 12 locations but without that incentive it would have taken months, if not a year or two.

This is a simple program from TPWD that has probably had a significant economic benefit on the parks and surrounding facilities. Including the second trip to Guadalupe, we drove close to a thousand miles to complete the challenge and even in the Hybrid that's close to 30 gallons of gasoline. We spent a night in Conroe and another in San Antonio, had nice meals at Mamacita's and Chili's, and all of those expenses were above and beyond normal weekend expectations. Yes, that means outside the budget, but I'll cover the Steve Diggs / Dave Ramsey issues in a later blog. We didn't go overboard, but we did contribute to the local economies in Brenham, Conroe, Luling, LaGrange, San Antonio and Lockhart.

We also helped TPWD directly with the purchase of a State Parks Pass. It paid for itself on Saturday alone, but we will certainly come out way ahead on that purchase before it expires. We're already pretty regular visitors at the state parks, but the challenge led us to some of the jewels of the system like Washington On The Brazos State Historical Site and the Government Canyon State Natural Area. We plan to visit those more thoroughly in the very near future.

Kudos to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department for this program. I look forward to what you do next!