737. Tacoma, Pierce County (WA10)

I’ve got to be honest with you here.  I have nothing nice to say about this building.  I have no doubt that it is completely suitable to the needs of the county, but aesthetically it is less than meh.  For a minute, I was concerned that maybe I had the wrong building, but the county executive works out of it, so that’s a pretty good indication that it’s right. 

The courthouse I would have liked to get a better view of was the US District Court for Western Washington.  It used to have a different name and function, namely Union Station at the western end of the Transcontinental Railroad.  I got close to it but definitely didn’t enter.  I could have, but the clock was ticking, as it always does (unless you forget to wind it, but who winds clocks anymore anyway?). I got a closer look at it as I was out grabbing caches, though.  I ended up grabbing two special ones right in this area…

The first was a Webcam Cache on the campus of the University of Washington.  That was easy enough.  Since it was running live in real time, I got to watch myself walk to it and then circle around to figure out what direction the camera was in.  A photo was taken and that was one more Webcam Cache in the books for me, the second of the trip and seventh overall! May I also say that I don’t like how the camera adds an indeterminate number of pounds that I will not enumerate at the moment, but that’s not important right now.

The second was a Virtual on the Chihuly Bridge of Glass.  Most Virtuals are pretty low rated, so a D5/T1 Virtual is a thing indeed!  Of course, the Difficulty rating is so high because you have to pick your favorite piece of glass out of so many.  From a more cynical perspective, that was not a big deal.  From a more earnest perspective, it wasn’t as easy as you might think because there was a lot of it.  I spent more time looking at glass than I would have thought.

But neither of those would fulfill the requirements of the Washington State County Challenge.  I ended up going on this long, circuitous drive to end up across the street from all that previous stuff.  In a little park under a major bridge, there was a pergola made of old timbers.  One of the bolts of that pergola was not what it seemed.  It was found and signed, so I took to the road again.  I had been warned to be wary of the so-called “Tacoma Aroma,” but I never encountered it as I left the confines of the city, bound for…