For a moment, I wasn’t even sure if the Crawford County Courthouse actually was the building that I was looking for. Luckily, one of the monuments outside bore the name that the pediment did not. That said, setting aside obvious issues of separation of church and state, what is up with these courthouses? In the greater sense, I’ve had a good history with gorgeous Missouri courthouses and had been thinking that it’s possible that the state may have had the best average attractiveness out of all the states I had visited thus far. This day, however, had pulled the rose color from my glasses and forced me to reconsider that assessment. The best had been merely disappointing, and the worst had been approaching Just Plain NO territory.
Every time I go on a serious trip, I create offline maps of all the caches in a county (truncating it to the upper tier for counties with too many caches to list). I had made these maps a little earlier than I usually do and only recently noticed that a new Earthcache had dropped a week and a half before. I thought little of it; I figured someone would get it by the time I got there. I thought that once before in Mississippi. I was wrong both times. As my daughter and I reached the outskirts of town, we saw the FTF was still available and turned left and away from town to go get it. We pulled off the highway onto a parallel road and looked at various strata of Ozark rock, examining how the various layers interacted with one another and what their colors and textures meant about the time periods they were deposited during. Once we submitted a series of answers and photographed her thumb and my trusty, long suffering umbrella, we logged it. That’s how I got my first FTF in Missouri and my daughter got her first FTF outside of Texas. With the elation from getting the FTF paired with the deflation of a weak courthouse balancing out, we kept going on to…
