Oh, Maine!
The York County Courthouse was nicer than I expected (I really liked the Jeffersonian portico), but its history was a little more confusing. Alfred has been the county seat since 1803. This building was completed in 1807. But the original county seat, established in 1652, was the town of York (which makes sense), and York and Alfred served as dual county seats from 1803 to 1832. For about thirty seconds, I wondered whether I should consider former county seats in my calculus, and then I forcibly shut my own mental piehole. Besides the fact that I’ve ignored former county seats in the past, there is no way on God’s green earth I’m going to do that! I’ve already made my personal project hard enough! I don’t need to add extra complications! And I needed to drag my friends into those extra complications even less!
Before we hit the courthouse, though, we had work to do. We had been making a point of gathering many different cache types in each state, so the process was beginning again in our new state. York County was home to the only Letterbox Hybrid for a hundred miles, so that seemed like a good one to go get. Krissy4884, Godot, and I stopped at a coffee shop across the road from a trailhead. Krissy4884 wasn’t feeling up to the hike that morning, so she stayed and got coffee, and Godot and I went for a walk. The trail was a retired train track and right-of-way that had been partially converted for other activities. The trees had not begun to change color as they had in Vermont and New Hampshire, but we could tell it was coming. The more piney trees probably lent their green to the overall hue. Godot and I continued an inexorable march for over half a mile to GZ, a distance I would normally never tromp for a single cache while on the road. We eventually pulled off the trail a couple hundred feet and found our Letterbox quarry wedged between two tree trunks. Victory was delicious as we savored the cool morning air and put ink on the log. On the way to Alfred, we also picked up a Virtual devoted to a weird and sad occurrence, the shooting of a circus elephant by a deranged man who claimed to be protecting local farmers from the temptation to waste their money viewing the poor creature.
Now that this county was done, we would continue on to the extreme extension of our journey, our farthest point of travel. We’d been looking forward to it for quite a while, so we were happy to arrive in…
Geocaching While Black 