39. Ballinger, Runnels County

The drive out here was particularly interesting.  I watched the trees and the landscape switch from green and rolling to yellow and rocky.  I believe I officially left the Hill Country of Central Texas and stepped my toe into the beginning of West Texas.  And when I got to the courthouse in Ballinger, I saw my first sign of it.  This is the first truly differently designed courthouse I’ve seen thus far.  I even started seeing ranches rather than farms.   

Sure, you have your range of military monuments and such, but this is the one that really caught my eye.  To sum up, many years ago a young cowboy fell into a river and drowned.  His mother paid to have a statue made of him in tribute and it was placed to honor all cowboys and ranchers.  That’s a good enough reason for me.  

I don’t usually talk about my DNF’s (Did Not Find for the non-cachers among you) but I think this time it’s warranted (especially since it will become a recurring thing for a bit here).  Luckily, the connection here was quite good so I was able to update easily.  There’s a cache on the courthouse grounds and I started looking for it.  I gave it 10-15 minutes, but I couldn’t find it.  Annoying, but it happens and I didn’t want to spend too much time on this because I was running under a time crunch.  No biggie.  There’s another one in the courtyard across the street.  I gave it 5-10 minutes, but couldn’t find that one, either.  Thing is that neither of them were difficult caches (both 1.5/1.5) and previous cachers on both didn’t find them either so I suspect they’re not there.  I also noticed they were both placed by the same person.  I’m thinking “That Guy” maybe needs to take a look at these caches, do a little maintenance.  But the upshot is that I’ve already spent a little more time in town than I really wanted to.  So I went to the virtual a few blocks away.

So it’s a library.  And it was simple enough.  Nice building and all that good stuff.  I logged and sent confirmation.  I also saw a lot of people around.  I think there was a high school football game in the making because there seemed to be a lot of spirit on the streets.  Spirit I wanted to photograph, but it’s hard to take photos from a moving car, much less good ones.  Besides, I had been running long so I needed to get moving.  So I updated my routes and headed off for…