This week, I found myself in South Texas for the second time, thanks to a balky DSP module in a console mainframe that wouldn't work until I personally blessed it (out). Having had a lot of fun hitting all the caches within 20 miles on my last trip two weeks ago, I decided to hit a few more distant ones this time.

I wasted my weekend ... picked up a nasty cold on Friday and spent the weekend recuperating. Realizing the only caching time I had left was nights after the 6PM newscast, I decided to make the most of it.

It's Wednesday night, and I'm back in my hotel room after the last of three such adventures at sunset, and it was probably the most eventful of the three. I thought I'd share it, for those of you who love a good comedy.

Now, they say that everything's big in Texas, and I've found that to ring true in most cases. There's a great burger chain here, a Texas tradition known as Whataburger. There are more Whataburgers here than McDonald's, and it's a good thing -- the burger compares favorably with some of the very best, including LA's "Astro Burger" and "In-n-Out Burger". A big ol' slab of char-broiled beef on a Texas-sized bun.

After today's Whataburger, I decided to hit some caches in the South Padre Island area. After days of drive-by, historic-marker virtuals, I discovered some traditional caches to be had near the island. After hitting a quick virtual on the way in, I arrived at "The South Won This One" (GCBE47).

I was relieved to see that there wasn't a lot of brush or scrub to slog through to get to this one. Snakes I don't mind ... I saw a coral snake (red touch yellow, kill a fellow) on a hunt earlier this week. Eight-legged critters and I, however, do not get along. By that I mean that if I saw a spider walk by and there was a priceless Ming vase at hand, I would instantly and reflexively grab the vase and use it to smash the spider to an unrecognizable pulp. I once found a wolf spider crawling on my shoulder and slapped it so hard I left a bruise. Pure, abject, irrational horror is hard to rein in, or reason with.

Bouncing across the critter-free sand without a care, I quickly found the cache, sat down and signed the log, sealed everything up, and hiked back to the car. What a beautiful place -- right alongside the Rio Grande, cacti everywhere, mesquite scrub in the distsnce ... picturesque. I hopped into the car, fired it up, and started to pull onto the pavement.

That's when I saw it. There it was, standing on the yellow line of the highway, defiantly, daring me to drive past it. It was ... the WhataSpider.

I do not exaggerate at all when I say that this spider was the size of my hand. I call it the WhataSpider because it probably weighed as much as the burger I consumed earlier, a burger that was now signalling its interest in returning the way it came. The spider, front legs in the air, was clearly of a mind that a Chrysler 300M was no match for it. It was probably 5 yards in front of the car and I could clearly see its fangs. It was solid black, and appeared to be wearing the pelts of small mammals it had eaten for breakfast. It waved its forelegs, wiggled its fangs, and just generally tried to look evil.

I rolled down the window ... after all, I had to confirm that this wasn't some sort of optical illusion. "Look ... I don't want any trouble!" I yelled, trying to sound friendly. There was no reply. We were only a few hundred yards from the border, though ... "Mira! Mira! No quiero te molestar!" Still no response. The nearby water park is called "Schlitterbahn", so perhaps this spider spoke German. It stood its ground.

I wasn't about to run over this thing with the car. In the first place, I am an arachnophobe, but I'm not merciless. In the second place, running over it it might have only made it mad. In the third place, I could envision myself running over the bugger, and NOT seeing it in my rear view mirror, and wondering where it was ... dead, or hitchhiking in the wheel well, knowing I'd have to get out of the car SOMETIME, and plotting its revenge.

I willed the Whataburger to stay down, steered for a wide berth around the eight-legged roadblock, and headed out. I watched it in my rear-view mirror as it ambled off into the weeds. I watched the road ahead, too ... all the way back to Weslaco, every speck in the road looked eight-legged to me.

I passed an agricultural inspection station on my way out, and the border patrol guys gave me a good, hard look, wondering why I was sweating bullets in an air-conditioned car, and why my face as white as the sand. They took a brief look at the car and, finding that I was smuggling nothing more harmful than Whataburger wrappers and a travel bug, sent me on my nauseated way.

Hidalgo County, Texas, has the distinction of being the original US entry point of the Africanized "killer" bee. Naturally, I had expected that if I were to experience any critter attacks while caching, they would be of the air-superiority fighter variety. I was watching the skies, oblivious to the ground threat. I didn't expect an eight-legged tank.

Next time, I'll be ready. A propane tank full of Raid Ant'n'Roach ought to do it. Or a shotgun.

Totals this trip: 9 virtuals, 2 traditionals, 8 legs, 1 major creep-out.

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Scott Johnson (ScottJ)

[This message was edited by ScottJ on June 05, 2003 at 03:29 AM.]

You don't supppose a bad reaction to something in that burger was making you hallucinate do you?

Just to play it safe I'll stay away from that part of Texas.

~erik~

Great story! Makes me want to go check it out. I suspect what you saw was a Tarantula, that would creep me out too.

Thanks for sharing!

See ya on the hunt!

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Originally posted by ~erik~:
You don't supppose a bad reaction to something in that burger was making you hallucinate do you?

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I have visited ALL the deep, dark corners of my psyche, and I can tell you that I am not CAPABLE of hallucinating something that ugly. Actually, having never seen a spider this size in the flesh, so to speak, I had always comforted myself by imagining that they were all animatronic, special-effects creations and didn't really exist.

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Just to play it safe I'll stay away from that part of Texas.

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Smart man. My flight leaves in three hours.

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Scott Johnson (ScottJ)

Great story!!! I don't know if it's a blessing or a curse, but I don't share the same arachnaphobia as you. I find spiders to be fascinating creatures and very beneficial to keeping other pests in control. My wife on the other hand regards any spider larger than a fly speck to be "huge" and capable of killing her just by being in the same Zip code. I don't show her the yellow banded (harmless) spiders in the garden that keep the bugs off the tomatoes that she loves so much. If she knew there were spiders the size of silver dollars crawling around out there she would never eat anything I grow. Now snakes I could live without. I know they have a place in the grand scheme of things and have gotten a bad rap from the book of Genesis, and I should learn the identification of harmless vs. poisonous, etc., but nothing is going to make the hair on the back of my neck stand up like seeing a snake in the wild. Last year I had a close encounter with a Copperhead on a cache hunt. After my life flashed in front of me I got out of there and never found the cache. And thank goodness for my trusty walking stick. I would flail everything in my perimeter, take one step, flail, take one step, flail... I did this for 1/2 mile

Hahaha. Great story. I bet it was a tarantula too. When I was a little kid (kindergarten)we lived in Haiti. We had tarantula holes all in the back yard along with all kinds of lizards and stuff.

One day my mom decided that she wanted to capture one of those giant spiders in a glass to keep on display. Picture the 5' tall Japanese woman with a broom and a mayo jar coaxing the hairy-legged spider...one thing she didn't know was that tarantulas have an incredible vertical leap...I seem to remember reading somewhere around a FOUR foot vertical jump. YIKES! It jumps into the air and WHAP-! she smacks it with the broom. Also...tarantulas break apart real easy.

-Sushi of the fisherKings

[This message was edited by Sushi of the fisherKings on June 05, 2003 at 04:23 PM.]

Hmmmm... my trip next weekend it too...

TEXAS!

The thought of What-A Burgers brings back many fond memories of when I lived in Austin, Tx. That is where I had my FIRST Jalapeno Burger. Yummy! It was back in hte early '70s and spent most of my time at the Armadillo World Headquarters drinking Shiner beer listening to the tunes of BB King, Freddy King, Johnny Winter and a little ole band called ZZ Top.
Ahh ... thanx for the memories

Just Lookin' For Some Tush - ZZ Top

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Originally posted by Aksor+Raskol:
.. My wife on the other hand regards any spider larger than a fly speck to be "huge" and capable of killing her just by being in the same Zip code.

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I guess you have no problem with this picture of spider in the AJC?

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Originally posted by Aksor+Raskol:
Now snakes I could live without... And thank goodness for my trusty walking stick. I would flail everything in my perimeter, take one step, flail, take one step, flail... I did this for 1/2 mile

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So much for Leave No Trace.

Sounds like a Tarantula. I lived in West Texas when I was a kid, and we were told they could jump large distances ... like into an open car window. Probably an exageration, but we always put the windows up when we slowed to look at one along the road.

CharlieP

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Originally posted by CharlieP:
Sounds like a Tarantula. I lived in West Texas when I was a kid, and we were told they could jump large distances ... like into an open car window. Probably an exageration, but we always put the windows up when we slowed to look at one along the road.

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Thanks, I am now shivering at the thought of that thing leaping into my car. I guess rolling down the window was not one of my more intelligent moves.

According to the border patrol guys, it was a tarantula. When I described it as the size of my hand (which is not small), they said, "Oh, just a medium-sized one." Apparently, this is Tarantula mating season, so every eligible eight-legged batchelor is out roaming the scrub. They search until they find a hole containing a suitable (read: really damned ugly) female. Apparently the male then says the spider equivalent of "How YOU doin'?" and nature takes its course.

Apparently the air-superiority fighters are out there too, in the form of mutant wasps that like to sting the tarantula, then lay their eggs in its paralyzed body. When they hatch, the wasplets get a spider smorgasbord.

Yuck.

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Scott Johnson (ScottJ)

Take a look at my log for the Da Box cache.

Long, long, long, ago, in my youth, I spent some time on Okinawa. (Kubasaki class of 69.) There were huge spiders in the jungles that sometimes caught birds and bats in their yard-wide webs. Creepy!

If you're not squeamish, click here.

See ya on the hunt!

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Originally posted by AllenLacy:
Take a look at my log for the Da Box cache.

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Not much in the picture to indicate scale, but he's an ugly one all right. The kind of spider that will make me remember to tuck my pants legs into my boots from now on. Perhaps I've just been lucky but I haven't encountered any huge ones here in GA. When they get so big that you want to shoot them instead of swat them, I'm in the wrong place

Scott

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Scott Johnson (ScottJ)

Ugh! Can we change the subject, please?