One half of the split heart tracking bug I recovered in Texas.
One of the peculiar things regarding my trip to Texas was how my two tracking bugs (TBs) had wound up there at JUST the right time, one being in a geocache near Austin and the other near Dallas. These were split heart TBs, the goal being that they be reunited once again by any geocacher who found them. Only it was beginning to look like I’d be the one to bring them back together after all, as my trip coincided nearly perfectly with their current locations.
Austin was an easy one, my TB there was picked up by a local youth pastor, who promised to hold on to it for a handoff during my stay there. We wound up meeting for lunch my last day in Austin, and as soon as we sat down he pulled it out and handed it over. All I could do was just stare at it for a while.
Remarkable. The last time I had seen this TB was in Boston literally over a year ago, when I dropped it off into a geocache for the first time. Who knew that I would someday find it again 1 year and 2,000 miles later? During my last night, I posted a short note to the geocache listing page where the other TB was currently hidden, asking all future cachers who found the geocache and happened upon my TB to please leave it there for me to pick up. In just another day or so, I would eventually come to bring together two split hearts that had already traveled all over the country in just a year’s time.
I found the whole thing amazing. One more 3 hour drive to Dallas, and I was soon going to reunite two tracking bugs I had released nearly 300 miles apart, one in Boston near the site of the Boston Tea Party, and the other in Central Park on Valentine’s Day.
Yep, I’m sappy. I used to daydream about finding these two TBs again too. Thinking maybe, somehow, some way, if I found one of them, then finding the other would lead me to the girl of my dreams. Maybe she would be a fellow cacher too, or maybe I would stumble across her path during my adventure to find these two TBs, or maybe, dare I say, we would both wind up looking for the same TB, and find it together. I could even picture her: startling brown eyes, raven black hair that tousled everywhere, a soft and radiant face with just a hint of sadness to it, but with a warm smile that told you despite the cruelties of life, she would still make the best of it.
So what happens instead? Real life sat on my $#^&#ing head.
On the SAME #$%^ing day I arrived in Dallas, some stupid haggish wildebeest of a geocacher grabs my TB, this despite my clear note to LEAVE IT THE FUG ALONE.
As if that wasn’t enough, the cache was already nearly an hour away from Dallas in the Colonies, so she takes it, and does what, but drives it ANOTHER hour away to her place. So now it’s two hours away.
Here I am just checking into my hotel, and suddenly I get this alert on my iPhone that my TB was picked up, and you could actually see the dark clouds starting to gather over my head. The bellhop even asked me if I wanted an umbrella.
After I settled in I fired a fast and furious email to this sea hag and asked her (nicely) how soon she could drop it off at another geocache, or if maybe we can do a handoff.
Sorry, she’ll be working she says, but she’ll maybe see what she can do Friday (one day before I leave Texas of course.) When Friday morning arrived and I still heard nothing from her, I emailed again and she wrote that she has no time to drop it off or meet me halfway so I could pick it up, couldn’t she just mail to me instead?
*crickets*
Mail it… to me… An act that would defeat the WHOLE purpose of finding these TBs via geocaching alone. I sighed heavily and emailed her no, that was alright, she can just drop it at another geocache when she gets the chance.
As for the other half of the TB, I dropped it off at a city park in Dallas. To this day they still have not been reunited, slowly bouncing around in Texas according to the latest stats.
My Lord, I was THISCLOSE. These tracking bugs had quite randomly wound up in two of the very same major cities in Texas that I would be visiting over a year later, spanning 2,000 miles of journeying by both flight and car rental, and despite all that, King Kong’s hairy sister steps in and finds a way to ruin what could have been a storybook ending.
Yeah I’m taking this personally. Why? Because I deal with enough of this crap in real life as it is, ok?
And even if it was a silly thing to do, just 2 little 50-cent split heart chains I bought at Walmart, it was the IDEA of it which got to me. That maybe, JUST maybe, if I was able to bring these split hearts together in the most unlikeliest of scenarios, somehow that would translate into the cosmos, and two REAL life hearts would be united together as well (mine and hers.) And if not, then at least it would give me HOPE that it could. I mean for the love of cheese and biscuits, give me SOME kind of sign that I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life alone with only a dozen cats and my teddy bear to keep me company. ANYTHING.
Nope. Wicked Witch of the West swoops in and craps on my head instead. Beautiful. Probably ran over a dog that looked like Toto too while she made off with my TB.
Watch what happens now. Eventually my TBs WILL be united some day, and I’ll get a thank you email from the two geocachers who found each other while looking for them, along with a few photos from their wedding. They’ll tell me how their newfound wubsy wubs NEVER would have been possible had it not been for the tracking bugs I released, and that it now sits on display in their living room, together at last. Thank you so much Lincoln!!!
That’s the day I decide to go outside and take a nice long nap on the train tracks.
