Adler's Midwest Meandering Spring 2021

 We had a quite the diverse and varied day.  We waited for the 33 degree temperature to warm up a bit and we struck off to geo-cache.  We needed two counties that we had to cache in today but anything extra was a bonus.  I think we got three.  Our first stop was in Cameron, Mo and there are three counties in Cameron.  It is kind of like the 4 corners of NM, AZ, UT, and CO.  Depending on where we found our caches, determined the county we could claim.  We found three in Cameron, and I think they are all in the same county.  One took us to a Veteran's Home and a memorial on the grounds.  The little fake item was on a huge artillery gun, and it was hidden in plain sight!  It took us a bit to find it, as it blended in so well.  Then we had to go to a Do-nut Shoppe and answer some questions to give us the clues from the sign outside.  The correct numbers and letters open a padlock to a large object in the parking lot.  We were lucky to be fenced in with two parked cars so not to draw attention to ourselves.  I think we got these caches in Clinton County.  

From Cameron we took Hwy 36 east to Hamilton, MO.  We had a couple of good stops in this little town.  First of all, our GPS took us to a large mural depicting J.C. Penney and what he did for this town, and large box shopping, in general. 

 This was the place that the first J.C. Penney store was located.  We did something wrong with our calculations here and our second set of coords took us 15 miles out of town, and we knew that wasn't right, so we counted again.  We are still coming up with the same answer.  We looked at other people's logs and they said the same thing.  We didn't have enough time in the day to spend too much time on this one, and we certainly didn't know anyone in town to PAF!  We noticed that the Missouri Star Quilt Shop was across the street from here.  I have tired to get here twice before and it didn't happen.  We go to the door, walk in and was greeted by a friendly young lady that said they are re-opening May 3rd!  We aren't doing well in Hamilton.  We looked around the downtown area, it seems that the whole town is reliant on the Missouri Star Quilt Shop.  The old Penney's store was completely taken over by the quilt shop, plus other places of business on that block.  We had other caches loaded, so we headed north, knowing that we will be back here again sometime when the quilt shop is open.

This is the building that we got turned away from, and from what we could tell, it is used for doing her tutorials online.  If you go to Jenny Doan and the Missouri Quilt Shop, you can watch many of her tutorials.  It is amazing what this woman has done for this little town.  

This is the other side of the street that houses all the fabric that the Missouri Quilt Shop sells, and because we couldn't get in, I am only guessing.  You can see the end store was the J.C. Penney Store.  One little tidbit that we learned is that when this young lad came into work for J. C. Penney, he showed him how to tie bows for gift wrapping.  That young lad went on to make his own success in the retail business.  His name was Sam Walton and he started the Wal-Mart stores.  The rest is history! 

I am standing next to the tallest spool of thread in the World!  It is 22 feet tall and 8 feet wide.  It is just a few blocks from the downtown businesses.  We had only loaded one other cache in this town and we needed a cache here to claim the county.  That took us to someone's front porch, where they had a bird house with a log sheet inside.  Whew!  We got Caldwell County.

This was our favorite geo-cache for the day.  It brought us to this Squirrel Cage Jailhouse in Gallatin, MO.  It was built in 1889 and used until 1975.  The jail is on the right and the jailer's residence is on the left.  The jailer's wife made all the meals for the inmates, plus for their own family.  There are only 3 remaining rotating jails in the United States.  One is in Council Bluffs, Iowa and the other is in Crawfordsville, Indiana.  This was a multi-cache, meaning that we had 3 stages to it.  This was the first and we found the coordinates here for the second one.  That took us to the courthouse in Gallatin. 

The Gallatin Courthouse was built in 1908.  We enjoy seeing the old courthouses around the country.  This second stage took us to the benchmark that on the building.  We had to use the date on the benchmark to help us navigate to the third and final stage.  It took out out on the north of town to a guardrail.  We found a fake bolt there and the log sheet was inside.  You would think after all of this, that the CO would have found something more fascinating than a guardrail!  We got our smiley and we also can claim Daviess County.  

We moved west now to Winston, MO.  This is the old depot in town and a famous event in history occurred about 2 miles east of town.  On July 15, 1881 The Great Train Robbery took place.  It was the infamous James Gang!  We found one cache n Winston.

We left Winston and found this geo-cache on our way north.  This long pipe was buried in the ground and we were to bring a half of a gallon of water along to pour into the pipe.  There are some holes drilled in the pipe to release the water, but you need to plug the holes so it fills up and you can grab the geo-cache that will be floating to the top.  Well, we forgot the water.  We were more concerned about our GPS, TOTTS (tools of the trade), and our lunch that we forgot the water.  We improvised our hiking stick with duct tape and put the sticky side out to go down and grasp onto the object in the pipe!  Very carefully, it was extracted from the pipe!  And we didn't spill a drop of water!  We continued on north to the Old Union Cemetery.  

                                                     This is the Old Union Cemetery.

This 'Union' Cemetery had nothing to do with the Civil War, as this pre-dates that period of time.  Union was the name of the town, and they were all working together for the town and surrounding area of Union.   The oldest date on a marker in the cemetery is for Rachel Powell.  She was born in 1771 and died in 1858. So, this ends our day today and it was very fun and educational.  We move tomorrow.