99. Midland, Midland County

Downtown Midland was a ghost town. Admittedly, it was early yet, but it’s obviously one of those places where downtown is only for Monday-Friday business. The nights are probably dead and therefore dangerous. I bet I wouldn’t want to walk these streets after dark. I actually got that feeling about the entire city. It felt like the logical extension of 80’s capitalism: a bleak urban landscape, dedicated to oil, labor, and making money. Maybe I didn’t see the cool Midland, but I can’t escape the feeling that there isn’t much of one, either. The closest I think I found was a bit of a seedy side of town (Scottish Pleasure, anyone?) while I was on the way to the cache. Seeing as I was working on Cache Carnival while I was out here, I made a point of focusing on high favorite caches and one of the most popular ones in the city was Specialized Parking. I drove to the edge of town to an industrial building, pulled into the parking lot, and guess what I found?

HA! Belly laughs ensued! And, of course, the cache…

Well played, sirs! Well played! This earned a favorite from my jaded, stingy self. And then I started back on the road. And soon enough I was on the way to…my second run in with the cops! So I’m on I-20 and going up to 75 when a trooper pulls me over. Really? I leave the hands on the steering wheel where they can be seen and explain the thing again, that I’m visiting, photographing courthouses. The trooper tells me that that stretch of highway is 65, not 75. I’m a little thrown by this because I look down the road and can actually see a speed sign up ahead that says 75. Well, maybe it’s not 75 yet, but it’s coming. And I’m getting stopped for this? I also noticed that he had a passenger who didn’t look like a trooper. Now that I thought about it, the day before in San Angelo? He had a similar passenger. Maybe they’re taking out trainees or something over the weekend and they’re stopping anybody they can to demonstrate what stops look like? I don’t know. This trooper let me off with a warning, though he did make a point of mentioning the warning I had gotten the day before. I took the warning and got moving out of town again.

Remember I mentioned that New Mexico was going to have ramifications? Well, here’s the big one: had it not taken so long, I would have hit my Odessa cache the night before and spent the night in Midland. Before I went to bed, I planned to sign the Permian Basin Challenge, the cache I hope to be my first 5.0/5.0 AND my 1000th cache. However, once I got moving, I forgot about it in my focus on the County Challenge. This means that I have to go back to Midland sometime in the next two to three months because I suspect that’s about how long it’ll take me to hit 1000. Maybe I can hit it passing through to Lubbock (which I would have also visited this trip, but that’s for later) or Amarillo. Either way, it’s going to be a bit of a pain. But what lengths are too much for a cache?

Again, that’s for another time. I went on down the road until I ended up in…