Thus far, North Dakota had been three for three with regards to its banger courthouses! Does the state actually make a concerted effort to fund impressive courthouses like this? Because it’s hard for me to believe that that even the smallest county seats have such impressive one and that every county can be similarly impressive. None of that is especially important, though. The cache is the proverbial thing.
So, the cache was at a church, which is not uncommon. The cache I got in Fargo was at a church and if I go back through the archives, I can probably find countless ones I’ve found similarly. As long as I stick to my long-held rule not to mess with a cache at a church on a Sunday, that’s no big deal. When I went for this one, as I was driving up to GZ and looking over the area, I could only see one place where it could be and, in fact, I even saw the cache from the street well before I came to a stop. It was a flat electrical plate on the church’s external cross. Now here’s the thing… I tend to avoid religiously themed caches for the most part because I’m not especially religious and when you inject one religion into something, you invariably turn off folks of other religions and geocaching is most assuredly an areligious activity. That said, I find it gauche to attach a cache to a holy symbol like that. If I was, for example, to go to a Catholic cemetery, most of which feature an altar and prominent cross in the center, and found the cache at the altar, I would find that bizarre to say the least. Not only that, be folks can get a little weird about people messing around with their houses or worship, much less their holy symbols. Something like this seems the stuff of nightmares to me: I go get the cache, somebody sees a weird, dark-skinned dude messing with their temple and holy symbol, and they decide to defend their faith and community by doing “something” about it.
This time, I got lucky. I guess nobody saw me. There were residences across the street, and nobody put up a fuss. Maybe I was just quick enough that I didn’t garner any attention (and believe me I was moving quick). I don’t know. But what I do know is that is that this cache was one of the most questionable ones I’ve found in quite a while. I’m not 100% everyone feels the way I do about this (at a minimum, the CO doesn’t), but I have a feeling that a lot more people agree with me on this than not, even folks with different views of religion than I have. That said, Traill County was one of the quickest counties I’ve done in a while. From courthouse to cache to car was nine minutes, a momentary diversion between the first jewel of my trip and the second jewel…
Geocaching While Black 