591. Ottawa, Franklin County (KS055)

Once again, I wish I could speak to the landscapers of the past to let them know not to obscure the fronts of courthouses with trees! That said, this courthouse does have something that I don’t remember seeing before: square towers! I’m not 100% sure I would have noticed it except for a placard out front that mentions the architect and his use of them. I also don’t feel like pouring through the archives to see if I’m wrong. And do I make a distinction between side towers and clock towers? So many variables! Overall, it’s a nice courthouse, but it’s also been a long night getting here. I expected to be at my main destination by this point, but I realized that I made my time projections based on the toll road, which I have already complained about at this point so I see no need to belabor the point. Suffice it to say that it represents an hour or more lost. Combined with the rain that had me slowed to a crawl, my early morning arrival looked more like a mid-morning arrival. Of course, I continued forward, both because mid-morning suited my needs just fine and because I was already 600 miles from home so what choice did I really have anyway? It’s not like I was going to pass over counties on the way here. I wasn’t in such dire straits!

As for the cache, it was a birdhouse in a front yard. I’m usually quite reticent about these and if I had arrived a couple of hours earlier, I wouldn’t have done it in the dark, a fact I was reminded of because my first walk up to it put me in the wrong yard. A number of people logged it as found in the last few days, so I figured it was actually there and sunlight made it less awkward. It was strange seeing someone pull up to the house next door and get out to talk to the occupants while I was still there signing, so I ignored him and tried to look like I was supposed to be there (he said hundreds of miles away from home and standing out like a sore thumb in a residential neighborhood). He didn’t make anything of it though so I got back on my merry way. My work there was done, so I continued on to my aforementioned destination, stopping sort of on the way in…