527. Anthony, Harper County (KS049)

A lovely courthouse for my final stop in Kansas. By the time I hit here, I was tired. I mean really tired. So tired that I didn’t even make notes about the courthouse because I was so done. So you can see that I wasn’t kidding… I was beyond commentary at that point. I just wanted to be done because I still had a couple of things to accomplish on the eight hour trek homeward.

There’s always a cemetery. I got the cache on the way into town because it was easy and I knew I was beginning to fade. It was signed and logged with a quickness so I could get to the courthouse and then on the road south. How many of you remember how many tasks I had to accomplish this trip? For those of you who remembered “three,” you get a cookie. How many of those people remember what they were, though? The first of them was to hit the final three counties of Oklahoma. That was done. The second was to return to…

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…Enid. Why Enid? I, from time to time, send the occasional postcard from the road. It’s rare, though, because most places don’t really have local postcards for sale anymore. Roswell did. I bet Cawker City would have. But, again, why here? As fate would have it, I know someone who has a daughter named Enid. That’s a pretty rare name to be sure. So I thought to myself how cool it would be to send Enid an Enid postcard postmarked in Enid! I actually thought this all the way back when I was coming here the first time, but the vintage postcards (because nobody makes modern ones) which I ordered well before time to make the trip arrived at home around the same time I was sitting in the parking lot of the Garfield County Courthouse threatening to change my phone service. This time, though, I had it in my proverbially hot little hands, so I wrote a postcard and dropped it in the mailbox of the main post office, across the street of the courthouse. This still ended as a comedy of errors because a) I put my return address on it for some stupid reason and they sent it to ME despite the addresses being specifically marked “To” and “From,” and b) maybe they don’t process their own mail anymore because it was postmarked Oklahoma City. Oh, well. Those revelations were weeks in the future then/past now (perhaps I should invest in a copy of Dr. Dan Streetmentioner’s Time Traveler’s Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations?) and besides, speaking of Oklahoma City, I had something else to accomplish. I ended up driving into a residential neighborhood and walking quietly onto a front porch to find a white mailbox painted with flowers (which I managed to botch photographing). I turned to the correct combination and opened the lock and within was contained…

…The Oklahoma 77 County Challenge. I had done a lot to earn this so it was sweet having it in my proverbially hot little hands. I signed the book and left one of my uni-coins and then got back on my way again. I still had hours to go before getting home, so I ended up doing something I don’t normally do. I have an uncle and cousin who live in Oklahoma City, so I gave them a call and they happily put me up for the night, which was a better option than sleeping in a parking lot for a few hours before returning back to Austin. This also gave me time to grab a few caches on the way home the next day, the most interesting one being…

…a bug I found out there. As fun as that was, though, the most important thing was that I got home to my own bed and finally get a good night’s sleep. And it was lovely.

And the next morning, when I awoke, I chose my cache for the day. I logged the Oklahoma 77 County Challenge.

And that is how I finished my third state, the Land of Red Earth and Despair.