Looking at the lovely courthouse, I immediately thought myself clever to recognize it as Second Empire. I was wrong; it was Italianate. I have to admit that I couldn’t tell the difference between the two in this case, which it probably why I’m not an architect or a designer. As I took my photos, I was reminded of the old days when I would take courthouse photographs at night and they would be terrible. I even remember my short-lived time traveling with an actual camera for low-light purposes. Can’t say that did especially well, but it was slightly better than what I previously had. No complaints here about advances in telephone photography.
Clarinda proper didn’t have any caches, so I expanded my view to the surrounding areas. All of those caches involved short hikes except one so guess which one I went for? It was placed to sort of honor Burma-Shave signs. For the especially young reading this (which is technically me because I’ve seen very few of these with my own eyes), Burma-Shave was famous for advertising by placing signs along roadways, each containing one line of a short poem. As you drove along, you’d see all the lines, completing the poem, ending with the Burma-Shave logo. In this case, the State of Iowa had created modern, vehicle safety- and tourism-based parodies of Burma-Shave signs, putting a series in each of Iowa’s 99 counties. On a traffic sign near the start of Page County’s series was a bison waiting for me.
I signed the log
Though it was late
And then began
To leave the State.
Burma-Shave.
Though I didn’t actually do it with rhyming couplets, I did, in fact, continue south. I was done with Iowa for this trip, but I would be back. There were 83 more counties to visit, after all. I entered into the northernmost part of Missouri and soon came to a stop in…
Geocaching While Black 