Oh, Indiana!
I’ve racked my brain and I do not believe that I had ever set foot in Indiana before this day. In fact, when I got here, I struck up a rousing rendition of Back Home In Indiana for myself. I even think I accidentally scared off a homeless person, which makes me a little sad that I might have screwed up his plans for the evening. I have just enough ego, however, to resent that he might not have liked my dulcet tones. Brains work in complicated ways.
As for the courthouse itself, it could use a little touchup paint, but otherwise is definitely in the running for the best courthouse I’d seen that day (though, I think the real winner was back in New Madrid, but that’s not important right now). But the real victory here was…
…the war memorial out front. Holy Mother of Crap! This thing was huge! This monument can beat up your monument! In fact, it’ll beat the crap out of anyone or anything who crosses it! It’s like the Confederate monstrosities I can’t stand looking at, but three or four times bigger. You don’t even know quite how hard it was to fit into one shot! You can’t even see that it’s at the center of a whole thing with lights and benches and landscaped terrace levels! I wonder if this or something similar was what Confederate memorials were trying to emulate. I don’t know, but I do know that I was impressed and, being blasé about so many things, that doesn’t happen very often. I’ve been so disappointed by courthouse memorials for a long time. This one, though! Some of you other counties need to step up your proverbial memorial game! And, as fate would have it, there is a cache here! but I didn’t find it. I suspect it’s a nano on one of the aforementioned lights, but I searched and searched to no avail. I even searched longer than I normally would on the road. I don’t usually fall victim to sunken cost fallacy, but this time I did. I didn’t want to leave here without it. But it was getting dark and, moreso, it was getting cold. It had been a bit nippy all day, but with the loss of the light came the loss of what little warmth there had been. So I called it quits a little after I should have and headed back to the car. I attempted another nearby cache at the town library, but I don’t think that one was there. It claimed to be a regular though it was probably actually a small, but either way it was somewhere where it should not have been hard to find. It may have been inside, which would have been a complication considering the hour. Of course, I have missed almost obvious caches before, but I certainly pass no judgment.
I ended up hitting a restaurant on the outskirts of town and look what I found in a tree! Lonesome Dove indeed! Once it was claimed, I killed Cachly and warmed up the official app to look at all the new souvenirs I had gained. The were so pretty sitting in a row like that. Even more importantly, for those of you not keeping count (because why would you?): Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana. I had hit seven states in one day. If I had a longer trip and didn’t have to care where I stopped for the night, I think I could have made it eleven (Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and maybe Maryland) but, that aside, GO ME! And go I did. I had one more county I definitely had to reach, the ultimate eastward extremity of my journey…
Geocaching While Black 