3. Person County -- Roxboro -- 4/7/06

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_County%2C_NC

Here's where the modern era of NC Courthouse Chasing begins. As you can see, I'm taking the picture at arms length, pulling a stupid face, and I have date stamp on, so you can see I'm not lying when I say I've been to a courthouse.

You may think Courthouses don't actually move, so there's not really much CHASING, per se, but you're wrong. The courthouse keeps moving and not getting in the picture. So I have to stand there with cars driving by while I'm looking strange, taking a picture of myself in front of a courthouse that won't stand still. Hey, it's not me. It's the courthouse. But I like being the only tourist many of these towns have seen for a long time.

Growing up, I would hear about my cousins from Florida who would visit my grandmother in Cary (we always saw them in Cary...no one would ever visit us in our Fayetteville house) going up to Roxboro to visit their other side of the family. I was always so jealous that they came all the way up from FL to visit a place in NC I had never been, but that they saw all the time. So I was thrilled to finally get to come here.

I drove to Person County because I got off work early on a Friday and wanted something fun to do. So I drove up to Person County. It's the obvious choice.

I've also never seen so many tobacco barns in my life! And I live in the Tobacco State! They're everywhere up in Person County, like white on rice.

There's a Confed statue to my left, but it's not facing north. I think it was more of an east or northeast. They had another soldier over on the other side by that brick building. He apparently volunteered to get get killed after two other groups of soldiers had already been sent out and were killed. So they built a statue of this legendary Person County Man. I thought that was pretty neat.

There's also a really strange intersection that I'm facing in this picture. Four roads come together in a weird way and there's always staggered traffic...you know, the kind of traffic when you're waiting to turn left where the cars are spaced as far apart as they can be without giving enough time for you to turn left through them. That's so annoying. But none of the directions have a turn lane, so you stop traffic behind you if you try to turn left. I decided that I would approach the light from all 4 directions and turn left just to entertain myself. So I did. And I successfully stopped the traffic behind me. While I waited for the light to turn yellow so I could creep into the intersection, turn left as it turned red, and leave the person behind me at the light. I have a feeling people in Roxboro don't like it when people do that.