County proof

Dan, checking in with another brief note here. I will endeavor to post a few more detailed posts over the next few days, after I sleep for about 200 hours. Also, Jay wrote a few blog posts that I'm sure he will post here sometime.

But I wanted to clear the air about a few counties. We did get a bunch of pictures of county signs, though not all of them. It was quickly determined that Jim was the world's foremost authority on county line sign photography, and he did a stellar job capturing many of the signs. Jay and I, however, are complete incompetents in that regard.

Plus there were a few county borders where there no signs. Overall, I was very impressed with the sign marking, especially on any state/US routes. And for most of the time even if there was no sign, it was obvious where we were from our maps and the road signs we could see. But there were a couple of times where our exact position was not clear.

• Gallia County. The plan for Gallia county was to come south on OH 93 from Jackson, OH. (If you want to follow along, get out the map website of your choice and start at Jackson, OH. OH 93 for about 15 miles or so, through Oak Hill and into Lawrence county. Once in Lawrence county, turn on CR 38 (Blackfork-Peniel Road). Unfortunately, we missed that road due to the darkness (it was about 4 a.m. at this point) and turned on to CR 39 (the next road south). We followed that road, if it can be called a road, for probably close to 2 miles or so to a T-intersection, but still we weren't sure if we had made it into Gallia. The problem was that it was hard to tell whether we had gone east on "Dry Ridge Rd" or south on "Township Road 152". If the former, we definitely made it into Gallia, if the latter, than we didn't. We ended up getting back to OH 93 and taking CR 38 for a mile or two just to be sure. But in looking at Topozone, it shows Union Baptist church on CR 39. We definitely went around the left (north) of that church and then went on for about 2 miles, so I'm making the call as definitely Gallia.
• The other close call was a few hours earlier, in Muskingum county. After getting off I-70 at Exit 141 near Brownsville, OH we went south on OH 668. The route said to turn left (east) on Bowser Road and take that into Muskingum. Again, this road was questionable in quality. Eventually we got to an intersection listed as "Palmer Road" and "Mt Perry Rd". Neither of those were on the maps that we had, so we backed out and were going to try something else (N on 668 to US 40 East to Muskingum). We called Jim's brother, working the night shift, and he was able to verify that Bowser Road turned into Palmer road once in Muskingum, so we were able to get back on our way with only a minimum of "pansy time".
• There were 2 other areas (in Richland and in Tuscarawas counties) where there were questionable road qualities, but neither of those had any possible county counting affect

Oh, and my mob-rule map is awful blue. Or at least it will be once his server updates it. It was a pickup of 30 new counties, which will leap me over 31 people on the official list. I now stand at 498 counties visited.