What a lovely beast in red brick! The clock tower is quite nice and I like how the arches over the doors and windows make for a simple but effective touch that gives a lot of personality (at least in my eyes). Add in the fact that the connected extensions are done in a similar manner and I feel happy to report that it’s a very well composed complex overall. No complaints from me here! Well, one… I was sweating like the proverbial demon in the proverbial church because the humidity level was over 9000, but what can one expect? It’s Louisiana and I’m three blocks from the Mississippi River. I will not ding the courthouse for the accident of its location, no matter how uncomfortable it made being outdoors.
There’s always a cemetery (though you can’t tell because my only photo of the place had some kind of malfunction)… Uncharacteristically, I opted to grab a multi. When I’m out on the road, I always feel a little wonky about going for something more complicated than a park and grab, but I felt this was the thing to do this time. When I got there, there was a couple already there. It wasn’t a vast cemetery (it wasn’t small, but the graves were all contained in a third of the total area) so their presence was felt every moment I was there. It was especially felt when I started heading off into the cemetery and the husband (I assumed they were married) seemed to head in the same direction. At first, I just thought he was walking and looking at graves like I was and happened to be meandering along roughly the same heading that I was. Once I got to the GZ, he turned, still looking at stones, to head in my direction. It didn’t help that the stone that I needed information from was not at the starting coordinates, so I had to look around for it while he continued meandering in my direction. After a little while, I was still looking and he was quite close. I thought this guy was going to approach me for some reason, and began formulating my reasons for being there which I was sure he was going to ask for, while at the same time fighting my natural antipathy to explaining myself in public. He came relatively close (within 20 feet), looked up at me, nodded in acknowledgement, and then kept on going. He did hover in my area for a little longer than I liked, adding to my suspicion, but he eventually made his way back to his wife and they left. While I’m glad that I didn’t have to have a random encounter with a random person out here in the middle of nowhere (we are still in the middle of a global pandemic and all), I’m also equally annoyed that I had to have to run all the scenarios and make the mental preparations in the first place. I eventually found the appropriate stone and transcribed the appropriate digits to redirect myself to the cache. And when I got to the new GZ a mile away, it was someone’s front yard. Hmmm… There was a telephone pole so it might have been there, but my instincts told me that this wasn’t the place. So I looked back at my corrected coordinates, thinking I had fat fingered a number when I input them. No, that wasn’t it. I took a closer look at the coordinates and the description. It turns out that there was a digit to be changed for the corrected coordinates that did not come from the redirection stone. If you didn’t pay attention (which I obviously didn’t), you’d have the wrong coordinates, ones that would take you to, well, someone’s front yard. So I fixed that one digit and headed back to the correct corrected coordinates, back in the cemetery from which I had just come. I had been parked fifty feet away from the cache the entire time I was there. I returned to the appropriate tree, and there it was, so obvious that it actually took me a few minutes to find because sometimes my eyes pass over something obvious when I’m looking for something that’s supposed to be hidden. I signed it and returned it, jetting off again to meet another another courthouse, another cache with my arrival in…
Geocaching While Black 