The Polk County Courthouse was more like what I had expected to find as opposed to Stockton. These lovely Romanesque pieces are always appreciated and the Midwest is good at providing them. Strangely, I had trouble finding the front. I was fairly sure there wasn’t a flagpole at first, but it turned out there was, it just wasn’t flying the state flag which was even stranger, but what do I know? They may actually raise and lower it appropriately for all I know.
The town is named after Simon Bolivar, the Liberator of South America. I once noted that if I could, I would love to go on an overland caching trip with him and several other notables. Unfortunately, I would first (and in no particular order) have to master time travel to pull them from their places in time and space and then learn to ride a horse. In this case though, Bolivar served a different function. The town had a pocket park with a Venezuelan-gifted monument commemorating the Liberator that was dedicated by Harry Truman himself.
As you can imagine, there was a cache there. I didn’t really want to go for a nano; my original target had been a Carnegie library, but the cache was inside the closed building. Luckily, the nano was easy enough to find but difficult to sign thanks to all the previous finders who had signed it the wrong way. I was forced to commit the disrespect of writing over some of their names, but that’s what happens when one takes up two inches of a nano’s log. Once I put it all back, that was my cue to leave. I turned off the main road through town and soon arrived in…
Geocaching While Black 