650. Pocahontas, Randolph County (AR68)

I pulled up to a courthouse. It was nice to see a courthouse that was not as intensely “Christmasfied” quite yet. That said, I thought it a cute little courthouse. It reminded me of Breckenridge a little. That said, I almost left here making a most giant faux pas! I pulled into town and photographed the historic courthouse…

…and only as I began to leave did I notice that I somehow missed the actual current courthouse catty corner from it!  A wave of worry ran over me at first because the memories of San Diego and Albuquerque still dangle over me like the sword of Damocles, but it was nothing to park and photograph the correct, true, and absolutely handsome beast!

The guiding thought for the county, from a cache perspective, was maintenance, maintenance, MAINTENANCE!  I went for three simple park and grabs, all found in the last few months, and none of them were there!  Looking closer, I’m not 100% sure the CO (and, of course, they were all the same CO) was even doing the thing anymore.  I marked them all for maintenance, but there’s no way that three park and grabs all in a row should be missing.  Worse still, nobody was reporting them gone.  These caches were being found every few weeks until a certain point and then nothing.  I know that people were looking for them and just let it go when they didn’t find them.  Some people would say that maybe I could have replaced them myself since they were so simple.  I didn’t bring my repair kit with me so I didn’t have spares to begin with, but even then I consider that for repair.  Let me put it another way: if I find the cache, but it’s broken and scattered about, I have no qualms about replacing a broken container, but if it’s missing entirely, I consider that the CO’s responsibility.  I’m not trying to be high-and-mighty here.  I have certainly committed that offense on a couple of occasions, but get it together, dude!  We all have to take care of our own stuff out here, not just because we said we would, but also for all the people who will be let down to find the cache and realize nothing is there.  In my case, I wasted a valuable half hour of time with a steadily rising anger level because of this.  I was running on a clock to…well, I’ll tell you about that later.  I had already lost a lot of time on winding mountain roads and this was time I didn’t need to burn off like that.  In the end, I got one at the foot of a road sign.  I could finally, triumphant but still surly, get out of the county, hoping to be in a better mood once I reached…