For my final courthouse of that day, I got a cracking one! But honestly, I was more concerned about getting back to Denver. I had gotten up especially early, so I was already feeling tiredness tugging at me, and I was staying with friends who get up early because of their jobs, so I didn’t want to keep them up late waiting for me. As a side note, I had another angle for the courthouse photo I would have preferred, but trees blocked it. Future Arborists of America, take note! Wheatland is an example of what not to do from an arboreal perspective. I made my time here brief.
Luckily, the Platte County Visitor’s Center held my solution regarding a cache. They were kind enough to have a Letterbox Hybrid, so when I got to ground zero, I set to work looking for it to no avail. I didn’t think it would be hard to find and was confused for a moment, but then I remembered: Letterbox. I read through the description (I should do that at the beginning more often) and found a bearing and distance that was easy enough to eyeball, though I ended up off by a few degrees, so it took me a few minutes longer to eventually find it …
… but I found it! I did what I needed to do and then set off south. I was a few hours away from rest and ended up making two stops on the way. One was expected, and one was not.
The expected one was in Cheyenne. When I got my first Wyoming cache, I opted to get the Webcam Cache there. Unfortunately, Wyoming’s county challenges, old and new, require physical caches. I had to find an acceptable one there, and I’d pass through it anyway. I pulled off the highway to a resort hotel and managed to find a quick and easy one hidden in a brick wall. That concern was finally off my brain.
The unexpected one? There’s a Buc-ee’s in Colorado! I knew they were branching out from Texas to other states, but I had no idea I would see one up in Colorado, of all places! It was also incredibly convenient, as I could enjoy using one of their legendarily clean bathrooms. And I grabbed a cache there as well! I long ago fancied the idea of making some kind of Buc-ee’s Challenge where each cache was a point, and you had to find a certain number of points worth of caches from different locations. Ones from outside of Texas would be worth double. I never did it, mainly because HQ doesn’t allow caches that directly involve businesses, and I don’t want to risk running afoul of them. I could have gotten around it (who among us has not found a Tramlaw cache before?), but I didn’t particularly feel right owning some kind of “Beaver Challenge.” But that was neither here nor there. What mattered was that I reached my friends’ house and got some well-deserved sleep.
The next day, I had a funeral to attend. But I had time to kill in the morning. I put on a suit and left early for…
Geocaching While Black 