959. Maryville, Nodaway County (MO022)

Once again, illumination was a winner for the courthouse!  So many courthouses in Texas would benefit from it so I wonder why so many don’t.  Is it a money thing?  While that would be my immediate guess, there were a lot of illuminated South Texas courthouses and that’s not an area renowned for its wealth.  To be entirely honest, there are a lot of courthouses that probably wouldn’t benefit from nighttime illumination.  Would one need to be grander or more interesting for benefit?  I don’t know.  That’s an amount of thought I haven’t really afforded yet. 

As I rolled through southern Iowa, I’d gotten some rolling hills, which I don’t immediately think of as being an Iowa thing.  But once I hit Missouri, I got the hills and curves I remembered from so long ago.  Of course, they were smaller ones.  One of the things I’ve always respected about Missouri is that, much like Texas, they tend to change/cut through the land to meet their road needs, unlike Arkansas or Colorado which hug and snake around terrain (though, to be fair, Colorado is understandable).  It had been a minute (four years) since I had been in Missouri and I had a list of counties I was going to hit while I was in that northern area.  But first, I needed a cache where I was. 

As fate would have it, the most favorited cache in the county was a mile and a half from the courthouse, close to the edge of town.  I pulled into the parking lot a veterinarian’s office and began the search.  The cache page revealed that it was dedicated to the CO’s now deceased cat and I assumed that it had so many favorites because cachers are a sentimental breed who can’t resist a good story.  I was wrong.  It was a decon container, but it was inside a puzzle box that, when assembled, looked like a log.  Impressive.  It definitely earned one of my stingily hoarded favorite points.  And all the stuff about the cat was sad, too. 

My original plan had me hitting a couple more counties before getting to Kansas City, but tiredness was catching up to me.  I had fifty counties on my agenda for a four-day weekend, and Maryville had been number forty-six in three days.  My last day would be spent driving to Texas.  I was already feeling the fatigue, and I knew I would be back in the area, so I cut two off the list.  The other two I kept.  They were on my way, so why not?  I headed for the highway and kept heading farther and farther south, eventually reaching…