374. Syracuse, Hamilton County (KS013)

If this courthouse wasn’t built by the WPA, I’ll eat a hat. A hat made of food, mind you, but a hat nonetheless. It’s handsome, but the biggest thing it had in my eyes at that moment was that it was quite unlike many of the others I’d been running into at that point. Variety is a thing, folks. I was lucky enough to make it before sunset, but I quickly set off to grab a cache before all the light was gone.

There’s always a cemetery. I wasn’t expecting one, though. As I looked at the map, however, I realized it couldn’t have been anything else, based on the layout of the roads.

I mean this in the nicest possible way, but once I found this, I wanted to stab the CO in the face! Does this look like a regular to you? It sure doesn’t to me and that is what it was marked as. If I had gotten here after dark and I was busy looking for a regular? I would have been tearing my hair out trying to figure out what I was doing wrong that I couldn’t find a giant box in a cemetery! It’s a good thing other finders mentioned it in the logs so I could shift focus. It was found, signed, and (saltily) returned and left behind.

It had been a good day, but I had to prepare for a serious strategic readjustment. As I mentioned back with Arikaree, if I stuck to my planned route, I would only get a few counties before I hit the Texas Panhandle, and then have a long, boring drive that would have a lot of trouble getting me home at a reasonable time. On the other hand, if I started in a different location in the morning, I could not only get more counties, but I could also get home at a more reasonable time and result in a shorter drive home. As a result, I decided to adjust position to start the new day in Oklahoma instead of continuing in Kansas. That meant a night drive. I filled up the car, grabbed some snacks, and hit the restroom, then started making my way to…