251. Greenville, Hunt County

Oh dear… Look at you… Now this is what I mean when I’m talking about a majestic building that presents itself to the world and to the county as the seat of power. Which is interesting because they went through a lot of courthouses (six others) to get to this one. What’s up with that? That may be a question for another time. May I also take a minute to talk about Hunt County’s most famous son …

… Audie Murphy. The bust up there tells of some of his wartime accomplishments. It doesn’t talk about all the movies he was in. He played himself in the one about his time in WW2, including the actions that got him the Medal of Honor. Fun fact: when he read the script about the scenes where he does his thing, he asked the script writers to tone the action back because he was afraid moviegoers wouldn’t believe it (so reality was actually more amazing than the movie). HE also suffered from PTSD and was very open about that fact, pushing the military to provide more services for vets coming home with it. And in between all that, he still managed to find time to raise horses, write poetry, and dedicate memorials all over the country. A lot of people like to throw around the term “bad-ass,” but I thoroughly believe that Audie truly qualifies.

One thing I especially didn’t expect was the murals around downtown. Whoever is in charge of this program should get a raise because I drove around for about 20 minutes just looking at these. Of course, you’re only getting a sample of them, but they were everywhere. But to be honest, they were a bit of a time filler. I had to get a cache and have some lunch.

3…

The cache was at a restaurant and while I was at that restaurant, look who I ran into? Messr. G. Slinkard, a local cacher of some repute and recent completer of the Texas County Challenge himself. I’ll tell you all a secret: one of my original goals was to beat him to it. Of course, being benched for a few months didn’t help with that so he ended beating me by a month and change. We ate and talked about stuff and things. Geocaching may have come up once or twice, but we were all over the place and who can remember? And once we were done, we parted ways, him heading back to work, and me heading to…