This was a nice little piece of architecture. Romanesque and Queen Anne Revival. I wasn’t deeply focused on the courthouse, not because I didn’t care, but because we were on the way to something special, one of the features that would define our trip. But I’m getting ahead of myself. We had to take care of Orleans County on the way there.
Our car made a couple of stops on the way up to look at and photograph some of the turning foliage and the misty hills (before the fog burned off). But we also had to stop for a cache. We (4everlyn, Razorbackgirl, and I) found a cache by the side of a road to try. I was happy because it was a cache with the name of the state in it (something we hadn’t found many of on the trip). They were entranced by the view. And quite a view it was. But it offered a problem: there was no way that a cache could be there. The green field stretched off with nary a place to make a hide, much less a small as it was supposed to be. There were a couple of larger rocks that could have supported a nano, but as we learned from TKDscouter a couple of hours before, ground hides are far less common in Vermont than in Texas because of snow and ice accumulation. After a few moments of befuddlement, we fell back to the more obvious answer: the coordinates were wrong. Across the road was a clump of trees, which lined up nicely with previous comments warning about poking vines. We crossed the road, dodging the only truck that came from the south while we were there, and made a quick search.
We rotated the top of a cut log, and our treasure lay within! A signature and stamp later, our job here was done. If I was a less jaded man, I might have given it one of my stingily hoarded favorite points, but I opted not to. While I had doled out a few in the days leading to Newport, this one just did not impress me enough. I know that endangers my resolution to award fifty favorites by the end of 2023, but, like Captain Barbossa, I consider it more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules.
Regardless of that, we mounted back up and headed to…
Geocaching While Black 