779. Frederick, Frederick County (MD04)

Frederick County, like Howard before it, has a more modern courthouse. This one, however, does not make me feel physically ill like the last one did. I liked the central seating area, but I was a little confounded that the statue there was John Hanson, the first president under the Articles of Confederation, instead of one of the many contenders for city and county namesake.

The cache, on the other hand, was simple. We ended up getting a Virtual, the most favorited cache in the county. The Marquis de Lafayette visited Frederick during his Grand Tour of the US. The local notables received him on the bridge into town and awarded him a silver jug. The bridge fell down, but a monument was raised to commemorate the visit, lending its common name to the Jug Bridge cache. After the hike to Jusef’s Cache, something simple was very welcome.

With the courthouse and the cache taken care of, we could turn our attention to the secondary aim of the county. On this trip, Razorbackgirl and Godot would finish Maryland, and I would be close, so we made a trek out to the Maryland All Counties Challenge. Kittydcota, Krissy4884, and 4everlyn opted to do something different and would meet us in the next county. Unfortunately, rain began to fall, and the three of us decided, after looking at previous logs, that it wouldn’t be safe to go after it in the rain. We chose to abort the mission. It would be the first time on the trip we had to let something go, but not the last. In this case, distance, fog, and road closures conspired to make the attempt sound unpleasant. But climbing around in rocky terrain in the rain is a sure way to get hurt, and safety comes first. That and Jusef’s Cache had already sucked the energy out of us.

I was disappointed, but all of it washed away as I crossed the Potomac River for the first time (oddly enough, traveling west to east, which I did not expect), intent on going to…