This is definitely a major county courthouse. I didn’t know I was going to make that joke when I took this photograph, but, in hindsight, of course I was whether we liked it or not. It’s definitely not a minor courthouse.
When I’m on the road, I play this little game where I attempt to find the cheapest gas possible. If I buy gas and then roll a bit down the road and find it a few cents cheaper, I shake my fist at horrid fate. If I find it cheaper in a different town, I don’t think too much about it because, well, I wasn’t there at the time. I mention this because I’ve been losing a lot this trip. I know it’s not much money in the greater scheme of things, possibly as much as fifteen or twenty dollars this entire trip. But this time in Fairview I lost big time. I filled up the tank on one end of town, and when I drove to the other side of town, I found two gas stations across the street from one another: one charging 20 cents less than I just paid, the other charging 30 cents less. My fist shook as to call down the fury of the heavens upon both locations. A pox on the convenience store that bilked me out of my heard earned Yankee dollars! I was truly sad panda. Or not. I spend a lot of time between towns on these trips thinking about weird stuff. If you had a running commentary on my thought processes on regular days, you’d be a bit confused by it, I think. Out here, with nothing binding me but the sky and the open road? My mind takes blinding flights of fancy.
As for the cache, I grabbed that on the way into town. There used to be a little red schoolhouse out here, but not any more. Someone cared enough to put up a little memorial to it and someone else cared enough to place a cache here. I’m actually quite curious about these little schools that have disappeared, possibly because my grandmother was a teacher herself for years in the small Black enclaves around Austin before she started working for (and eventually retiring from) AISD. All of those schools and communities are gone, absorbed into the growing metropolis, redeveloped for…a more affluent citizenry. This one no doubt fizzled out for different reasons. I saw a similar example back in Ville Platte, but these are obviously not connected. Maybe these schools have a history in Oklahoma but, with quick consultation of Wikipedia, nothing obvious appears. All I know for sure is that once children played and learned here and now they do no longer. Somewhat sad, but it is the way of things.
With that, and expensive fuel, I continued on my trek, next setting foot in…
Geocaching While Black 