796. Snow Hill, Worcester County (MD16)

Snow Hill presented another lovely offering in the way of another Georgian Revival courthouse. The first courthouse burned down, the second one (after renovations) burned down, and I can only hope this third one manages to limp along without the lick of flames. I’m trying to give it something poetic because I had little to say about it in the moment. There was something far weightier on our minds.

We pulled up to the side of a restaurant’s fence and parked. GZ led us to where the fence met a telephone pole, and we began our search. A party was taking place on the other side of the fence, so we thought the revelers would be far more interested in themselves and their merrymaking than in us. The sun had just dipped below the horizon, so this was a reasonable assumption. It was also an incorrect one. After a minute, a lady approached us, asking if she could help us. This is why I try so hard to be stealthy and take care when picking my caches. Usually, when someone sees me, a random Black dude doing weird stuff, internal biases kick in, and it gets confrontational. In an attempt to defend myself, paired with my disdain for explaining myself in a public space, I sometimes get confrontational as well. Less so after years of facing this very scenario, but the seed of it is still within me. But in this case, I was with a nice, non-threatening lady who can turn on or off her Arkansas accent to get the best reaction out of strangers. So, as Razorbackgirl talked about geocaching, I kept looking. It turned out that the lady who approached us was the restaurant owner, and while she remembered about a cache being there, she had never seen it. So, we found it and showed it to her.

More importantly, we had accomplished one of the personal missions of the trip. With this cache, Razorbackgirl had finally gotten every county in Maryland! We had no champagne to pop, but things were as festive as possible, considering we all had another 125 miles to drive that night. For several nights of the trip, we merely stopped where we wanted to stop and got a place to stay. But we had particular places to stay for a few nights, and this night had been one of those nights. Razorbackgirl, happy to have finished the state, I, happy with the sixteen counties I had gotten, and the rest of us all drove north. Because of the late hour, some of our specific plans had to change, but it was enough for us to set off to…