Welcome back to Illinois, folks! I was greeted back to the state by a gorgeous chonker of a courthouse! It was such a nice departure from the many disappointing courthouses of the day before. I also noted that Evansville was the nicest Illinois town I had ever seen in sunlight. All the others had been either economically depressed like Cairo or visited in the middle of the night like Golconda (maybe? Because I have idea what it would have looked like during the day). I had no doubt that Evansville’s picturesque nature had something to do with its proximity to … well, we’ll get back to that.
Considering our location, there was only one cache that would do. To be fair, I write that as it wasn’t one of my goals for the trip. My daughter and I drove out of Evanston to a nearby highway and after a bit, there was a Letterbox Hybrid to be found just off that highway. All we knew for sure was that it was a certain distance from a quince bush and neither of knew what one looked like. We pulled up a picture of one, but without blossoms it looks like any other bush. Besides, I’m not a plant person so I probably still wouldn’t have gotten it right. Luckily, the CO was there to save us. She came out to say hello and chatted for a bit. She was kind enough to point us in the right direction. She pointed out the quince bush and then pointed out the other marker to watch for, a green decorative boat which had faded in color over the years it was installed (the original marker was her husband’s former green boat which had eventually been disposed of). As fate would have it, we parked right by the cache and didn’t even know it.
And within the grassy, non-quince growth we found a mailbox.
And within the mailbox we found “Slices of Quince”, the oldest extant Letterbox Hybrid on Earth.
Oh yeah, that and we grabbed the Virtual at the world’s largest bottle of ketchup while heading to…
