Being that I am an unimaginative hack, you know very well what was playing in both my internal and external soundtracks as I rolled into town. The strings sped my way to the courthouse and a certain amount of disappointment found thereat. The Cass County Courthouse was absolutely lovey, but Future Arborists of America, attend! Once again, a perfectly lovely courthouse has been completely obscured behind rows of trees! That was especially a shame because all that red brick with the lovely tower was gorgeous, far more so than Moorhead was. North Dakota was definitely beating Minnesota with its courthouse game. Unfortunately, there was another disappointment I was associating with the area: flies and gnats. All morning as I went from county to county, the second I came to a stop they seemed to swarm around the vehicle. I had to shoo more than a few out of the car while I was in motion. In Fargo, they almost overwhelmed me. I found myself constantly moving around the courthouse parking lot just to avoid them. As I had learned from visits to Louisiana, it was something I would have to learn to live with.
When looking at the map for nearby caches, one in particular stood out. Why would I ever turn down a large in the center of a town? I drove a few minutes away over to a church and parked in the lot. After a short, poignant conversation with a nice muggle who was leaving as I was arriving, I made a short search to no avail. I double checked the logs; people with much less experience were finding it, so what was I missing here? It turned out that I didn’t go behind a building feature and when I did, I found a covered up five-gallon bucket. It was missing all the trackables that were supposed to be in it, but I left a couple to make up for it. And once that was done, I stopped the clock and set off again. For all my strictures and routes and timetables, there are other things than caching (yeah, I said it!). There was another reason I came to Fargo. The last time I saw a movie star could have become … questionable. This time, though, I had no such worry. I went over to the F-M Visitors Center and saw a thing of beauty. It wasn’t just your average piece of agricultural machinery.
Ladies and gentlemen (or however you identify. I don’t mean to be gender assumptive), THE Woodchipper. The original prop itself. It’s not often I get to see a movie star so close, but it was worth all the trials and travails I had faced getting there (full disclosure: I had faced neither trials nor travails). Of course, once you’ve seen one of the most famous items in cinema history, where do you go from there? To the next county, that’s where! I got on the highway and headed north for…
Geocaching While Black 