There is nothing of benefit to your endeavors at the posted coordinates. They were chosen for artistic purposes only. The starting point for all of the caches in this Wherigo series is N 30 32.611 W 097 32.828. This is where you will find Henrietta, the iconic matron of all the Hutto hippos.
Henrietta was instrumental in developing this cache series. She wanted to bring more visitors to her hometown and had heard that geocaching was popular. So, she contacted all of her hippo friends to see if they would be willing to participate in a Wherigo cache series. A total of eighty (80) hippos responded positively to her inquiries. It was interesting to note that all of the positive responses came from hippos that happen to reside in public areas such as businesses, offices, schools, parks and libraries. Apparently, those hippos that live on private property did not want to be disturbed.
This Wherigo cache series requires you to find the eighty participating Hutto hippos. These hippos are not located at the posted coordinates, but Henrietta can identify all eighty of them. Unfortunately, she does not know much about GPS navigation. If approached, she will be happy to point you in the right direction by providing you with the heading and distance to each of her participating friends.
When you do locate a hippo, approach it to determine whether or not it is participating. If it is a participant, the hippo will identify a specific geocache and will provide you with the final coordinates. If the hippo is not participating, it will simply ignore you.
Alternatively, you could begin your quest without acquiring information from Henrietta. Simply drive around Hutto (it’s not that big) and approach the hippos you find. Sixteen are located within a quarter mile of Henrietta and a majority of them are north of US-79. Just a handful are more than two miles distant. You should be able to find almost all of them in this manner. If you have difficulty in locating a few of the hippos, you can turn to Henrietta for assistance.
Remember that all of the participating hippos do live in public places in Hutto. There is no need to go onto private property.
To play the game, you will need to download the Wherigo cartridge. There is a single cartridge for the entire series and it can be downloaded from this or any cache page in the series.
Make sure to “resume” the game every time you visit Hutto to play so that you don't lose any information from previous visits. As a precaution, it might be wise to write down the cache number and final coordinates each time you receive this information. Have fun visiting the Hippos of Hutto and be sure to bring your own writing instrument to sign the final logs.
NOTE: For Android users in particular, please make sure that your GPS is enabled every time you resume the game. Also, due to a problem on the Garmin GPS with having more than 7 active zones, the Garmin may not work properly. It did not work well at all with a Garmin Oregon 450.
NOTE 2: A value of 1.0 has been added to the difficulty rating due to the necessity of first finding the hippo. So a difficulty 2.0 is really a 1.0 difficulty as it pertains to the final physical container.