171. Longview, Gregg County

We’ve been here many, many times.  Heck, I’ve even been to this courthouse on several occasions for various reasons.  The girls’ grandparents live in a small town on the outskirts of Longview.  Apparently their town decided to incorporate before Longview annexed them and placed the yoke of their tax rates upon them.  I’ve never been fond of Longview.  It always felt like a town of fifty thousand people with an extra thirty thousand stuffed in.  Not to say it feels like everything is tight in together.  Just the opposite.  Longview seems sprawled out far more than it should have any need or right to be.  But then again, I lived here for a (very) short period of time so I have opinions about it, more so than most county seats.  

I especially mention this particular Confederate monument because, though I have seen similar style in several places (Bastrop and Bay City, I’m looking at you especially), I’ve never seen one with a muse recording the glorious deeds of our fighting men in gray.  Never have I yearned for some sort of sarcasm tag in HTML more than I do now.  Ironically, this will not be the most…interesting one of these I will see but that’s a story for another time (about a week and a half from now by my estimate).  

Of course, if I may paraphrase the Bard, the cache is the thing.  There was one across the street in a pocket park next to where I parked the car, the girls inside enjoying the cool.  But the sun was beginning to go down so my youngest decided to get out and help.  The building wall of the park was tiled with painted and glazed art, over two thousand in all, hence the name of the cache.  We looked and poked until she finally found the little green Tupperware in a short tree.  Helpers are always nice. The log was signed, swag was left, and we went to get dinner and call it for the evening and bed down for the night.

My former in-laws didn’t know about the Project so I told them about it.  The girls opted to go with them the next day to the Texas Shakespeare Festival in nearby Kilgore so I would have the next day to do what I do well.  They were a little concerned for me though, mentioning East Texas’ questionable history with minorities in general and black people in particular, warning me about Marshall, Linden, and Paris in particular.  I won’t lie.  I’ve been avoiding East Texas for a while, but now was the time to begin it proper.  So I was off before dawn the next morning, ready to attempt to meet the sun in…