Night becomes you, you piece of the Midwest! Illumination does wonders for you. The limestone lower juxtaposing with the brick upper works well. I would give a warning to the Future Arborists of America, though. The courthouse’s lovely tower was partially obscured, and I could find no good vantage to photograph it from. Not a full-throated signal to attend, but something to keep in mind for the future.
I made an attempt to find one cache by the side of the highway coming into town but quickly realized it wasn’t there and that it had been reported missing two years before. For a quarter of a second, I considered driving to the other side of the county for a chance at an FTF on a Multicache that had dropped that way, but I thought better of it. FTFs are nice on the road, but not worth going out of my way for. I would have happily skipped that one on the way to Belzoni had it not been on my way into town. I ended up finding a cache in Red Oak. As you all know, I’m not a fan of front yard caches, but a cacher put one out front of his grandmother’s house and it said it was available at all hours. By my reckoning, it was one of those hours, so I went ahead and grabbed the lock and lock that was there. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. And with that accomplished, I continued on to…
Alright, here’s the thing. Sometimes, I lie. As I started heading for my next county, I noticed that that as of yet unfound Multi was only about five minutes out of my way so I went ahead and took a closer look at it. And by “took a closer look,” I mean drove to and parked nearby. It was named for the statue at GZ, Willard the Pig though, in my slightly tired state, I mistook it for Wilbur of Charlotte’s Web fame. Willard was a tribute to the pigs that had kept area farmers afloat in leaner harvest times over the decades. All that was required for the Multi was to get some words off a plaque, count them and then do some math to get corrected coordinates. So I went ahead and crunched some numbers. Once I had done so I discovered something important: the CO had made a mistake in their formula! Luckily for him, I’ve got years of math under my belt and was able to figure out that the correct outcome could only lead to one of two places, and since both of them were within reasonable distance from one another, I pulled out a flashlight and checked them both. One of them was near the road I had driven in on in the middle of a grass field. The other was in some bushes at the foot of a tree. Guess which one I investigated further? I felt the old discomfort from searching along in the dark for a cache in the middle of nowhere. This is why I like to have my trusty maglight when I’m hunting for things in the dark in the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately, I hadn’t replaced my previous one that I had given to my older daughter to keep in her car yet. I much preferred that she have a light source and a form of defense. But I still carry the flashlight that took me to the APE all those years ago, and it provided more than adequate light for my search, even if it did little for my anxiety.
I went into the bush and came out with my quarry. Inveni, inscripsi, reposui. That’s how I ended up with an FTF in Iowa of all places! And a Multi to boot! I made note in my log of the math mistake and then set off again triumphantly! The only way it could have been better was if it had been located a few miles down the road near…
Geocaching While Black 