Category Archives: Brian

Apr2

Roadside America-a treasure trove in miniature

Posted on Tuesday, April 2, 2013 by Dianne

When Sean was little, Brian and a pal who also had a young daughter, took a road trip up to see the work of Laurence Gieringer in Shartlesville, PA. I didn’t hear a lot about it, but in my mind’s eye it was more like a train board setup. Since we were about 30 minutes away from it on our day trip last weekend, we decided to go see it again all these years later. I was told it hasn’t changed in years and years.

Here’s the story right from the webpage:

Laurence Gieringer founded Roadside America. The story goes that young Gieringer’s love of miniature models began around 1899, when he was five years old. From his bedroom window, the young Gieringer could see the lights of the Highland Hotel at the crest of nearby Neversink Mountain. From his distant vantage point the building looked like a toy he could snatch from the mountain and add to his toy collection. One day he set out to get that seemingly miniature building, not realizing how far away it really was. Soon he was hopelessly lost in the woods and was not found until the next morning.

Fortunately that experience did not dampen his love for miniatures. In his adult life Mr. Gieringer became a carpenter and painter. Over his sixty-year career Gieringer amassed quite a collection of tiny, detailed buildings and accessories that became one of the worlds most famous and amazing miniature villages. Mr. Gieringer today is one of the world’s most respected builders of miniature models. (he passed away in January of 1963, over 50 yrs ago!)

In the 1930’s word of Mr. Gieringer’s amazing model railroad and miniature villages spread through the local neighborhoods.

What a sweet inspiration for Laurence to think the faraway hotel was a miniature!

Here are some shots from our visit. Brian, my hubby took them all. Most are a bit overexposed so you can see the detail of the layout.

So you can see the sign is in disrepair. So sad!

It’s such a huge layout! See the teens of the right there?

We got to see the light pageant when the lights were dimmed and all the houses were lit up. Then there was a movie on the wall and Kate Smith sang ‘God Bless America’

It would be a shame to see this place close down. I think it’s worthy of the Smithsonian Institute!

Mar27

Daytrippin’ on Brian’s bd

Posted on Wednesday, March 27, 2013 by Dianne

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Sunday was my hubby Brian’s birthday and we decided to go somewhere a few hours away. We headed just above the Reading area to one of Pennsylvania’s ‘nature wonders’ Crystal Cave, Roadside America and the West Reading area.

I happen to turn on my phone (it’s not working anymore….died today) and saw where a geocache was just hidden about 45 minutes earlier. We turned around and headed back to yet another ancient cemetery cache. Sean got out of the car with me and we headed to the far end of the white washed wall. Sean actually had to climb over the wall and there it was, it was nicely camouflaged with fake ivy! So neat to be the ‘first to find’ for the second time.

The GPS took us down a winding road, but we saw lots of scenery too.

After a quick lunch, we got to the Crystal Cave area. There were balls of snow along the roads which we haven’t really seen down this way all winter.

I had to climb a rather steep hill to the entrance of the cave. I’ve been having problems with hills and since using the bike, I can see a little improvement, but I still had to stop a few times. After the tour, I was surprised at actually how steep the hill was!

The cave was found by mistake in the 1871. Two farmers were blasting for limestone (valuable for enriching the soil) and found the cave!

The cave itself was pretty neat. Brian took some great photos. It’s thousands and thousands of years old!

The ‘ball room’….there were actually a few weddings in here-one they had 100 people squeezed in here! That’s the altar to the left.

See Abe Lincoln?

When all the lights go out at the end of the day, 100s of bats fly out of the cave to fly through the night! Eek!

At one point, the guide turned out the lights and it was black as pitch. I felt and retrieved Sean’s hand. : )

They got a few inches of snow here the next day. We actually got more. It’s all gone now.

Next post-Roadside America!

Mar25

Orchids were the only thing ushering in Spring around here

Posted on Monday, March 25, 2013 by Dianne

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On the 23rd, Brian and I met my mom and brother over at Longwood Gardens. I bite the bullet and renewed my yearly pass. I say this as I was wondering if I could do the walking there after the past few months. Actually this is bazaar thinking on my part. I ‘need’ to go there for my gardening, flowers and photo fixes. My brother just bought a pass too! He will be bringing my mom out here now. That’s pretty neat.

Brian went along too. As we were walking in, a lady ‘waved’ a ticket in front of his face and said ‘do you want a ‘free’ ticket? Before I could say anything, he said ‘no’! He said he figured I will get a free pass for him via my membership, but still, you have to pay attention to what someone is offering. 😉

It was a nice display and mom said she liked it better than the flower show.

(Brian took a lot of photos too, I can’t remember which he did and I did, so we both will take credit for these).

This was so pretty to walk in to see from the blustery, but sunshiny day:

Yellow is one of my favorite flower colors.

I mean ‘wow’!

I’m a big fan of true blue flowers too! Who doesn’t love these Blue Poppies?

I think these are African Daisies or mums?

Did I mention I like Chartreuse too? Maybe this is a bit more lime color.

Warm colors are nice too.

I like this one for the demo effect-look at the gardeners’ hands. LOL

And what they were making:

Oh I could show you 80 more photos or more! I will be uploading them to Flickr. You will see them in my sidebar there.

A nice man took this on Brian, my mom and me.

Mom has been a bit worn out from her long walk and standing a lot, so I hope brother will push her around in a wheel chair sometimes. Can’t wait for them to see the rest of the gardens!

In the next few days, I’ll share with you our daytrip to Crystal Cave and Roadside America!

Mar13

Exploring Philadelphia

Posted on Wednesday, March 13, 2013 by Dianne

Gallery

This gallery contains 14 photos.

When Brian, my brother and I went to the Flower Show, Brian and I decided to look for a geocache nearby. Now remember, it was busy and wow, was the GPS bouncy. We walked down the block and there was a beautiful Methodist church shrouded my modern buildings.: Who is that lady with the pigtail? […]

Mar11

Brilliant! A look at the 2013 Philly Flower Show

Posted on Monday, March 11, 2013 by Dianne

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This gallery contains 22 photos.

My brother asked if I wanted to go to the Flower Show down in Philly this year and I said fine, but I wanted Brian to come along too. We were going to take the train down from my hometown, but we would have a half hour wait and it would be 2 pm by […]

Mar9

Finally saw Silver Linings Playbook

Posted on Saturday, March 9, 2013 by Dianne

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With all the local hype associated with this movie, it was about time that Brian and I went to see it.

Sean had seen it in the fall with a date and then they went to the diner where a scene was filmed. Also, we lived under 3 miles from where it was filmed (for 2.5 years in an apartment complex as newlyweds) and wanted to see the different neighborhoods and they did look familiar too! Tina Fey and Todd Rundgren are from close by this area. There was a scene when Bradley Cooper’s character was talking to the principal of the high school. I know several people, including one of my bridesmaids who went to ‘Prendy’.

This is a neat shot from the movie. I’m not sure if I ever ate here, but we have been by the Llanerch Diner many times.

Bradley and Jennifer Lawrence were really good in this movie (this was suppose to be Halloween, hence the waitress in the funny outfit-lots of locals here).

We’ll have to go explore down here, just outside of Philadelphia, one of these days. I think there is a tour that correlates with the scenes in the movie.

Today, Brian and I went on what I thought would be easy caches finds, but alas they weren’t! We saw places that we have never been to, so that’s really one of the main reasons to cache! The phone navigator wasn’t working great though. Got some more exercise!

Yay, my new glasses got really dark today!

Brian look perplexed at a bridge cache. I saw a picture of what we should have found, and we surely didn’t see it.

We did find a pretty awesome one that looked like an electrical box on a sign for a restaurant complex.

You find some you don’t!

Mar7

Colonial cache hunting

Posted on Thursday, March 7, 2013 by Dianne

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On Tuesday I went to the rheumatologist, a young lady doctor. I brought all the past papers I had from blood work to a CD with x-rays. She asked a lot of questions, looked at my hands and knee and said that I had osteoarthritis. This was causing me to be so fatigued after doing tasks that were just part of my everyday routine only a short time ago. She prescribed a medicine which I tried for the first time last night. I slept 4 straight hours which is a record for me lately. But I have been very foggy today and my eyes are bothering me. I am to try it 4 nights in a row to see if I can tolerate it for the daytime. I love doctors that give you $90 medicine ‘to try’. We are lucky to have the keyring app on my phone and we only paid $17, but still that isn’t cheap. I did do 3 miles on the bike today! That helped perk me up a bit.

Brian had gone with me to the doctor and we went and grabbed a sandwich to split before going on a bit of a cache hunt out near where Brian grew up.

I’m not crazy about caching in high traffic areas. People wonder what you are doing, especially the security guards driving around the shopping centers!

The first cache was in a little park near where a railroad use to go through. We had a little climbing to do and we saw a few old wooden rails. Brian finally saw the little box under a fake rail!

The next cache was an area where an old tavern once stood. We were to park near one of those big electrical towers. Now in the summer time this will be all overgrown. We went to where the cache was suppose to be and saw some trash ‘and’ a discarded VHS tape. I thought Brian had checked it, but alas he hadn’t. If we can’t find a cache, I come home and look on the site at the location via satellite where the cache was and we were right there. Maybe it was the tape!

The next one had us driving in circles around a shopping center. The Colonial buildings were sitting right near the road and we were driving past them-we had seen them many, many times before and never stopped to look at them. We saw the Whitford Lodge when we got out of the car:

I believe there is a printing firm on 1st floor now.

The cache was a walk through the parking lot to a gully, up the gully and under a tree-pretty easy compared to the last one!

We then went to the next shopping center where another cache was. This is the Zook house as you can see. I read up on it (couldn’t find info on the place above) and the Zook family lived there for a number of decades. It had to be moved so they could build the mall! I really like this photo with the sign and shadow of the tree showing on the house.

The cache here was near a stream, but down the hill. But we didn’t see it. Actually Brian didn’t see it as I didn’t go down the hill. With the mall traffic, I think this one probably goes missing a lot.

We use to go to the next place when we were kids. I use to live out this way until we moved to Delaware County when I was 4. Brian grew up out this way, but down the road from me. We never met until we grew up!

Right near the Zook house was the building that use to be The Guernsey Cow. We use to stop here and get the creamiest ice cream ever! Now it’s a DNB Bank

This is the back

This is the front-appears to be about 1959 or so from the cars…

We then went to another shopping center and found a few caches and had tacos at ‘On the Border’.

I wanted to look for ‘just one more’ near a bus stop at the shopping center for a magnetic cache, but I couldn’t find it in the dark.

There are a few more Colonial caches to find, but we ran out of light…some other time.

I’m pretty sure I’ll be going to the Phila. Flower show after all! I just can’t take one of those pills or I won’t appreciate it.

Mar4

The best time for a long time

Posted on Monday, March 4, 2013 by Dianne

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As previously mentioned, my classmate from high school had a new movie that came out a few days ago called ‘Phantom’. So my other friend John suggested a bunch of us go see the movie last night (Sunday) and we did, many with our spouses. There were close to 20 of us there and we of course got all excited when we saw Wayne in shots (another class mate who is an actor) and I recognized Todd’s daughter who played Ed Harris’ daughter in the movie. Todd really had to do his research on Russian submarines! The year was 1968. Lots of action and a twist at the end. The guys will love this one!

At the end of the movie, Scott, our reunion coordinator had Todd on the phone and we were all cheering him on. That was very cool.

Afterwards, about 11 of us went to a sports bar a bit down the road for a late dinner. We gave my other pal Tom a ride in the Cruiser. It wasn’t too noisy and we got to catch up with my ‘back yard’ neighbor Bethann who came to her first reunion/mini reunion get-together!

I’m next to Tom and John is on the other end. We play ‘Song Pop’ on Facebook and usually are pretty neck to neck.

All in all a great time! So glad Brian and I went.

Feb22

I’d rather look at scenery

Posted on Friday, February 22, 2013 by Dianne

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Made a blunder today-but I ‘really’ think the receptionist did as I wrote down the 22nd on my laptop post-it note. I was seeing a doctor for a consultation who is past my hometown, so a good 45-50 minute drive. We got there a bit early and I was suppose to be there yesterday. Why on earth they don’t have an reminder service like the dentists do, I don’t get it. Anyway, after my red, embarrassed cheeks toned down, I let the woman copy all 14 pages of my blood work and a few things from the web. I made another appointment, but her remark about probably needing another 2 grand of tests (she’s got to be wrong as I had some specialized tests done already), I decided to hold off until May when my insurance won’t call everything a pre-existing condition.

We stopped at a local mall for lunch. First I told my hurried hubby to stop near a cache we tried at night. He looked first. I can’t even imagine what people are thinking as they whizzed by when people are looking around a pine tree. He didn’t see it-again! No way! I got out of the car then and the hint said it was on the left of a tree and I picked up some pine cones as a decoy maneuver-lol. I spotted the purple bison tube right away-yay!

We had salad and pizza at Carrabba’s-I saved half for my mom as we were going to drop by briefly to see her.

I asked Brian to stop by a neighboring park, just for a quick look, and the GPS was bouncy. We didn’t find the cache, but I did take this neat photo:

We dropped by my mom’s and I shared my lunch with her.

Home just in time for the hubby to make his shift! Whew!

My pal Carole introduced me to a new GPS scavenger hunt called Munzee. I have one right here if you want to join and scan it. There aren’t too many around here yet, but I bet there will be soon!

Feb15

Back in the geo-saddle again

Posted on Friday, February 15, 2013 by Dianne

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Today I felt good enough that I asked Brian if we could go to a number of ‘researched’ geocaches along a busy section in nearby Delaware (okay, I used the satellite feature on geocaching.com, but I don’t do that all the time-it’s such a busy area, it was wise of me to do this). He agreed and off we went right before 1! He cashed his check and we went to the first few caches. We also brought the Canon and I didn’t take any of the following shots, they were all by Brian!

This particular shopping area is what I call ‘cement city’. A nice bonus though is two ‘lakes’ with walking paths. Behind me is Red Robin. The fountains are lit up at night, very pretty.

We found a few pill bottles along the way. One cache was a pill bottle attached to a piece of wood floating in an open post.

One we looked for on Monday we did find in a matter of minutes. It was placed my a new geocaching buddy at the British Pub. We still need to get back there to eat again.

I liked one that was on the back of a blue light reflector. I think I had an audience when I retrieved it as a guy was sitting in his truck a bit away watching.

Hello Kitty! I replaced the other very full log!

It’s one in a water bottle for a marble trade. Clever log attachment!

We had a great salad at SaladWorks-the tuna nicoise and did a little shopping. When the sun was setting, I suggested we look for one called ‘Red Wing Pond’. It was the perfect time of the day to take a walk on another trail in the above mentioned shopping area! We looked and looked, but we think it was missing. But do enjoy the photos Brian took.

‘Cloud Wings’

Had all my gear…no cache to add to. To my left was the pond.

I felt really good today. My aches were not that bad and I don’t know what I did! I am not drinking soda of any kind for Lent for 3 days now or a tummy medicine may have calmed down more that my stomach. I have no idea. I have a feeling tomorrow may be different but crossing fingers.

Want to go to the movies? You take a few escalators to get to the 16 different theaters.

Fairly new homes have a nice place to walk and plenty of shopping in cement city.

We are expecting one of our little ‘snow events’ overnight that will probably melt away by the afternoon.

I forgot to update my readers to let you know my brother’s dog Baxter made it! He was given more medication and he’s much better getting up and going outside. : )