830. Kimball, Kimball County (NE28)

That I even made it at all was its own kind of epic poem. Actually, that’s not true. It was more of a cliché. You see, thanks to some issues I blame on the creators of iDevices, I didn’t hear my alarm go off this morning. Therefore, I woke up about fifteen minutes after I had actually planned to be at the airport for my flight to Denver, an hour before my flight was supposed to take off. Three minutes later, I was dressed and in the car. I flew (euphemistically, of course) to the airport, got parked and shuttled to the terminal, got my bag checked in, and got the luckiest wave-through at TSA checking. All that, just in time to arrive at my gate and see the walkway pulled away from my plane. But they were able to put me on the next flight three hours later. I looked at my plan for the day and made changes that would save the three hours I lost by arriving later. It turned out that I would pass through one of my stops for the day on the way back to Denver at the end of the weekend, so I moved it from the start of the trip to the end. By the time I boarded, I was brimming with confidence that it would all work out.

And it did! I made it to my destination with a minimum of muss or fuss, got a car, and hit the road as I am wont to do, finally reaching Kimball to begin my work.

The Kimball County Courthouse was unassuming, and I mistook its classical revival style for a WPA knockoff. One of these days, the architecture is going to stick in my brain, but yesterday was not that day. The unassuming courthouse was a good match for the humble town that Kimball was. It was quiet even in the middle of the week. But I was there for business other than observing the character of the town.

My first attempt at a cache was a 4-H cache that had been sitting unfound for over six months outside of town. When I got to ground zero, though, I found a torn-up tree behind an electric fence. It sure looked to me like maybe the property was private (at least now, if not previously). Either way, that was a no-go. I shifted to the other side of town for a slightly more popular cache named for an adored (though weird and scary-looking) children’s author. I was annoyed to have to waste all that extra time getting to it, especially after everything that had happened a few hours before. But then I remembered that Kimball was small, and my detour took an entire ten minutes out of my day. I found a big old bison tube in an evergreen and signed the logbook, somewhat disrespectfully signing over the stamp of an Iowa cacher who took up a lot of the log’s space. That is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, but that’s neither here nor there. What mattered was that, with the chill of the air cutting through my cardigan, I returned to the car triumphant and got back on the road again, bound for …