667. Fort Scott, Bourbon County (KS084)

Excellent!  This is a gorgeous courthouse!  Oh, and may I give extra kudos to the pro-Union statuary.  I know I don’t talk about it anywhere near as much as I used to, but seeing Confederate crap all over the place gets really tiresome.  I know, I know…  Heritage something something, but it’s my heritage too, and I’m not a fan.  That said, I expected no less from a city named after a fort named after one of my perennial heroes, General Winfield Scott. 

As for the cache, both for you, my adoring readers, and for my own glory, I decided to break my own rule.  There was a historical site that I thought would be interesting to feature, and it happened to have a Multi-cache associated with it, so I took some time to go get it for y’all and for the town’s namesake.  Welcome to the Fort Scott National Historic Site.

I got what I needed from the various exhibits and complexes and signs, plugged it in to correct the coordinates, and set off for the final.  I found myself at the sign for a walk-in clinic which, from a certain point of view, fit the cache hint, “Walk.”  Except I obviously did something wrong because all the previous logs mentioned a path, which made more sense considering our chosen hobby.  Ironically (I thought), someone I know from back in Texas found it earlier in the year, but I didn’t know them well enough to have an immediate form of contact.  After a moment’s consideration, I decided to cut my losses.  I had already wasted twenty or thirty minutes, and the fort was about to close when I left.  So, I decided to fall back on a park-and-grab ammo can.

Yes, you read that right folks, a park-and-grab ammo can.  As you can tell, it’s being guarded by this mean beast.  Well, maybe “guarded” is the wrong word.  “Obscured” is probably a better word.  Either way, I signed the log, obscured it again in its guarded perch, and was off.  I had several more counties to hit before I called it an evening.  Luckily, because of the hard push of the previous day, I was shooting for an early evening, so this didn’t mess up my plans too much, but I could have ended the evening earlier or even called an audible and fit in an extra county.  My point here (and I do have one) is that rules exist for a reason.  There’s a reason I don’t usually do Multis or involved caches while I’m on the road, and now you have graphically seen why.  I opted, in the spirit of the only life advice I have or likely ever will take from Taylor Swift, to shake the proverbial “it” off and leave my ignominious defeat behind me in Kansas, finding rebirth in a return to Missouri (possibly the first time that idea has ever been expressed non-sarcastically) to see…