817. Bennington/Manchester, Bennington County (VT02)

Bennington is another county with dual county seats, but I had to give short shrift to it today; I only got the courthouse in Manchester.  Hitting courthouses was a big enough ask as it was.  I wasn’t going to drag people to a second, out-of-the-way courthouse.  I’m demanding, but I’m not a monster.  A big item on our list for the day was to get Vermont 1, the oldest cache in Vermont, located right outside Manchester.  We got there to find that the main road to Vermont 1 was closed off while undergoing construction.  I suggested that since it was the weekend and we had a vehicle with four-wheel drive, we could still make the drive up the road, but I was outvoted.  Further, nobody felt like hiking up the closed main road to get to the path to the cache.  Our bellies full and our energy levels somewhat depleted (we’d been running and gunning a bit for the previous few days), we decided it wasn’t essential.  We’d already gotten several states’ oldest caches with more to come, so we could let this one go.

We went easy and found a simple cache in a guard rail after not finding an incredibly hard, probably missing, D1.5/T1.5.  A cache is a cache is a cache.  Time wasn’t exactly on our side, so we had to go.  We still needed to hit several counties on the way to our fixed lodgings for the night.  We were off again, this time slowing in…