I got up this morning without any particular plans about what I was going to do today. So I first met up with equiraptor , decibel45 , penny246 , and maiteclay for a burger lunch at Hut's.

Without any particular destination or mission in mind, I headed up Mt. Bonnell just to go. Wandered around for a bit taking in the view, and peered down at the finely manicured houses by the lake. Some of them even had sturdy metal fences between the yard and the lake. If you had a lot with one side against the water, would you really put a fence up?

Then I headed off to Mansfield Dam to see whether they were letting people walk across it again. Ever since September 11, the old road over the dam has been closed to pedestrian traffic (and vehicle traffic too, of course). But sure enough, it's still "temporarily" closed.

I've always been curious about the "low water crossing" bridge visible south of the 620 bridge over Lake Austin. So I drove down there and found an LCRA park on the south side of Lake Austin. The low water crossing bridge doesn't go anywhere - the other side has a gate on the left labeled private, and a gate on the right with a no access sign. But from the park you can walk along the shore all the way up to the power house at the base of the dam. Someday when there's more water I'm going to go back there when there's something flowing.

When I got back to my car I remembered that my GPS still has all those geocaching waypoints and there's bound to be some around the dam somewhere. In fact, there was one right in the same park, and I'd walked right by it twice! I went back to the spot where it should be, but couldn't find it. At the time I didn't know what I was looking for, and now I do, so I'll be back there again.

There were a bunch of other caches a short way south of where I was, and I went to go check those out. After a few wrong guesses about how to get there (my gps map doesn't have all the new roads), I finally located one by the side of a trail. It only had the coordinates of another location though! This one was a multi-cache. I found the second location easily, which gave a third set of coordinates, but I couldn't find the third location. After poking around for a good half hour or more, I gave up and went to find another. The next one I found looked like it was in the middle of somebody's front yard (I didn't try to look for it there). I found out later that the listed location wasn't the actual location of the cache at all, but just the starting point for a puzzle cache! More advance planning needed, I guess.

Perhaps tomorrow I'll go find the ones I missed today, now knowing the clues and other useful information. I think it'd be fun to go with somebody else, anybody want to join me?