This gallery contains 19 photos.
We had another weekend come up when the guys were both off on a Saturday. We decided to just go somewhere, but where? I was looking at the geocaching map and Ocean City, NJ was going to destination for the next morning. Then I started moving up the coast and landed on Coney Island in […]
Sun setting over Chadds Ford, PA, originally uploaded by DianthusMoon.
On the way back from my mom’s house, I asked Brian to turn down Creek road to where the Chadds Ford Historical society is located so I could get my Instagram shots for the day. I was really pleased with these shots of the beautiful landscape and building.
The side of the Chadds Ford Historical Society
There’s something about the sun raising and setting that adds a special ambiance to a photo.
We did a little caching on the 23rd near the state line in DE. First we went to Mill Creek Meeting house. What a quaint place. The GPS pointed to a group of trees, but the hint was ‘metal on metal’ and we found the bison tube near an old chain link fence.
This is the side facing the road.
The Quakers are a very peace loving group. Brian is a peace loving person too!
We then went down a side road where this place use to be.
There were quaint old homes back here that had been renovated. I’ll have to go down this road some other time to take more photos.
We found a cache in a guard rail- but near the end of it-a pink pencil box and another cache in a guard rail in a magnetic key box. Brian took this photo and I used an Instagram filter.
We get to see such pretty sites on these little excursions!
We’ve had heavy rain late in the afternoon for days. A few days ago we saw this:
Awesome!
Sean went for an interview up in the city of Lancaster yesterday the 27th. We tagged along hoping the big farmer’s market would be open, but it wasn’t. So we looked for a geocache around the corner. It was opposite a convenience store. We started to look for it and the shop guy poked his head out of the door and said ‘you’re cold’…as we were near a phone pole. He said he could see it from up where he was standing and I backed up a bit-there it was under a smelly trash can (the kind with wheels) ugh.
Sean was in with the guy at the LanCo Conservancy for over an hour. It’s only part time work through September. It’s also 45 miles one way from our house. Some things to consider. But maybe the guy knows somebody. It seems it is who you know these days.
I went to see an Orthopedist doctor today. I guess the young lady I was seeing before was an assistant. Seems she got the issue with my back wrong. I have lower left ligament issues. The doctor thinks that my fall last year even shifted my pelvis a bit. And the physical therapy that caused me pain was all wrong for my issue! Now don’t you think they would have figured that out the first time I went there? I am to get an MRI, but in the process of seeing if the insurance will pay for it.
We lost an old apple tree yesterday. Down it went in the direction of the yard, not the bank. We don’t get the previous owner’s reason for planting trees on a bank. You can’t pick the apples without a long tool. They weren’t so great and the deer and wildlife were enjoying them today.
The tree was behind her.
I thought I’d get a break from doctors and have two things to do the week of the 8th, 45 minutes in opposite directions, Monday and Friday. When it rains it pours-literally.
This gallery contains 15 photos.
Yesterday Brian and I were off to do our bimonthly food run. We have a few stores we like, but we decided to go to the one up in Gap, PA. They had some ‘buy one get one free’ items and I think they alone were worth the trip. But first, we did a little […]
We got up on the 9th and headed to a crowded Dunkin Donuts for a quick breakfast which was anything but that! Seems everyone wants their beach munchies at the same time. When we passed just a few hours later the place was void of vehicles.
We headed to one of my favorite spots on earth-the inlet of Ocean City, MD. There is so much water around you! There’s the jetty, the view of the boardwalk and amusements and Assateague from across the bay.
We were here a few hours and ventured to around O.C. for a few more geocaches and back to North Park again.
I found a clever birdfeeder cache at OC city hall (looking for photo)
and one in a neat ‘tropical’ garden Dewey Beach, DE too.
We found a cache in the Isle of Wight park across the bridge from Ocean City
We stopped for salad and pizza and then headed to the Old Navy store-can’t go there without buying something. We got on the road and I asked Sean if we could stop in Milford, DE to see a cache that is suppose to be a haunted house. He said why not!
When we drove up, I thought it looked like a movie set! Eek.
That little window must be for decoration only!
So we go around to the back and GZ seems to be an herb garden. I am looking under this silvery herb which I think was Santolina and Sean is starting to get attacked by mosquitoes. I say to him, ‘Can’t you lift one piece of this herb to save my back?’ He comes over like he is ‘guided’ and lifts the section where the cache is! Now that is spooky! I read that paranormal investigators were in this house all night and asked the ‘occupant’ what games did they like to play? (they try and keep to the period of the people who resided there) and they picked up ‘slipper’ as a reply. The investigators researched ‘slipper’ and it was indeed a childhood game of the Civil War era! They learned how to play the game and the electro magnetic fields (I think this is what they are called) were more active when they were doing so!
When we left, we were approaching a red light and I said, ‘Sean, you are going to go through a red light!!’ and he didn’t stop! Hope it was because he was just tired or should have taken off his sunglasses. There was a car to the left of the intersection too.
Anyway, we got home in good time and reflecting on the trip, we were glad we headed south.
Sean doesn’t have too many Sundays off working retail. All last week he was saying he wanted to go to the beach and Brian just couldn’t get off (he’s retail also). So Saturday we are looking on the internet and couldn’t find a cheap enough place until Sean called a hotel he’s been to before. They had a room, so the two of us got our act together and were on the road by 1:45, just a little over an hour later. We stopped to cash in a bag of coins and got $67 for them (paid for gas and our dinner). If we had known a grocery store was across the street from the hotel and that we had a microwave, we could have utilized them.
My stipulation was that we could stop if needed and we did a few times for a bathroom break and to geocache! We stopped at a few beach towns in Delaware as we decided to skip Rt. 1 for Rt. 113. First we went to a park in Millsboro. DE near a canal.
The geocache was in crevices of that big tree. There’s Sean in the red shirt.
That’s the Indian River Canal. We really like seeing new areas like this.
The next little town was Selbyville, DE. The cache was at the museum that use to be the train station. Sean posed with the 70s(?) Plymouth police cruiser out front.
Despite stopping a few times, we got to Ocean City, MD in just over 3 hours.
The Carousel is a nice, beachfront hotel with an ice skating rink inside. The whole town was hopping with mostly high school seniors and a girl’s lacrosse tournament! We saw them everywhere!
We ate at a place across the street from the hotel called ‘The Green Turtle’. We had to wait a while. Once seated, a group of young ladies came in for dinner. Sean recognized a few from his Penn State days, but it was a bridal party dinner and he didn’t want to say hi. It really is a small world!
I saw that a geocache was called ‘OC Sunset’ and we decided to get there before the actual event happen. It was a park we have never been and there again, many lacrosse matches were going on.
I got some pretty awesome shots. We worked our way down the pier at North Park-it was 0.16 of a mile to where the cache was stuck under the only bench there. Sean found it!
The pier we walked down to the cache.
And there it goes!
We went for ice cream and a smoothie and a little shopping afterwards. I called it a night and Sean was just getting started. He likes a club there called Seacrets and he was headed in that direction. I was about to fall asleep when my ‘neighbors’ came back and decided to jump on the beds like monkeys (male teens) at 1:30 am. One time the picture moved over head and I jumped a foot. Sean was back by then and at 2:15 I called the front desk and security came up and knocked on their door. Shame on them for acting that way in a family hotel! There are motels just for groups like theirs.
I’m stopping here and will talk about Day 2 soon. We saw a few more nice places and grabbed a total of 10 geocaches! Sean is liking caching much more now. He sees it’s the adventure and the cache/log is just the prize at the end.
Skipped some stones to get this cache in Banning Park, DE, originally uploaded by DianthusMoon.
Brian and I did a little mapped out caching on the 6th (yesterday). I hadn’t been feeling well earlier in the week and had to miss work again. I think I have a food allergy to sweet potatoes. I’m keeping a food dinner diary and I asked Brian if he remembered when my tummy was bothering me another time and I looked it up and we had eaten sweet potato chili. I really liked that chili too! I’ll make it another time to see for sure. Tuesday I even ate Greek food from Wilmington’s festival and that didn’t bother me and it’s very rich.
Speaking of Wilmington, Sean and I drove down to the church to retrieve the take-out. Each sampler is only $15 and I got two meals out of mine. We stopped at a park to find a cache first. We didn’t know where to park, so Sean went to a school lot for about 10 minutes. It didn’t take long to zone into the area and I saw this:
The cache was in the pole behind the sign and difficult to retrieve!
I really liked Cool Springs. We figured out you were only allowed to park on side streets on the other side of the park. When I found the cache, I told Sean to go sit in the car in case someone came along. No one did.
With the first mentioned caching, Brian and I went to Banning Park near Newport, De. There were a number of caches there and I always like finding a new park.
The bridge was the second cache we looked for. The first was in a curved hedge. Now I don’t know about other cachers, but if there is anything I dislike more about caching is sticking my head is bushes. They hold dirt and stuff like a barrier. We looked quite a bit and were right where the cache was suppose to be, but we didn’t see it. Strike one!
So we went over to the bridge. Again we were in the right spot, but a FB caching pal said in her log that she didn’t get too wet or dirty, so I knew what I had to do. Brian didn’t volunteer to walk in the stream. And lo and behold, there was the cache under the bridge! Yes!
We went on to find another bridge one that was kind of out in the open and not hidden well. We then looked a bit for one near a pond. It was along a fence, but also near train tracks so the GPS went wonky a few times. I finally walked away and then approached more slowly and it stopped at correct spot and I saw a cammoed sack which was the cache!
We went on to a pavilion hide. When we first arrived, some school was having their picnic or field day and there were at least 200 kids in bright red t-shirts wondering around and in the area of the pavilion. They were all gone by 3 pm, but alas, I think they had to find the cache there or it was in the bush we stuck our heads in several times. People have to remember that birds will make nests in shrubs too. I told the cache owners it may be gone. I’ll be curious to see if anyone finds it after us.
We went on to find a few caches along Rt. 4 on our way to dinner and the grocery store. One was a gunner in a memorial park. Brian found that one.
I had my ‘cheat’ dinner last night which was a ‘baby’ cheesesteak on an Italian roll. It was so skimpy, I am sure a real baby could eat it and still be hungry. Maybe it wasn’t much of a cheat. I’ve been trying to stick to whole grain bread.
There was a cache near the restaurant at a restaurant. We walked over knowing it was one of the light fixtures on the side. Pretty sure the shades were down in the restaurant, but didn’t a waiter come out and in poor English want to know what we were doing! I showed him the app, he didn’t get it and wouldn’t leave until we did. At least we tried to find it.
We are having lots of rain today. Brian didn’t have to work, but he had to clean up water in the basement. I decided to tidy up the pantry closet as stuff was just hedged in there and falling out. It took a little while, but I got rid of old food and almost empty cereal boxes.
Sean has off Sunday, so thinking about doing a day trip. I know he isn’t into driving a lot, but Brian doesn’t have off. I hope we can see something different not too far away!
Every year we take a drive to the part of Lancaster County that is closest to us, right off of Rt. 1. This year we decided to stop for a geocache first and went up and down some rural roads to end up at a very small cemetery. It was actually across the road from houses similar to ours, so I guess many moons ago, it was way out in the country and provided a permanent resting spot for the local farmers and their families. Well at least a few of them. There were a few interesting ‘plots’ that had chain around them and metal tassels like you’d see holding fancy curtains back. I didn’t venture around much as the grass was thigh high and I already had one bad tick bite this year (just had a Lyme test today too). So I looked for about 5 minutes or so and couldn’t see anything. The cache owner and her mom have a few caches in these parts, but neither take care of them anymore. I even brought a new container and log as I saw where they needed replacing. I think the original is gone now.
So we were a little perplexed about what Street Road to go on and we turned way to soon! There is one before the reservoir and one after it! We’ve been here at least 3-4 times now, think we’d remember by now. Of course it turned out to be a blustery, cool day…again. And it didn’t take me long to go through the four different greenhouses and fill up a wagon and then some.
I will have to take photos of the different kinds of petunias I got from almost black, to yellow with a black edge, to the peachy yellow, the chartreuse with pink and pale lavender. All the plants came in last night as we had cool temps. Not tonight though. I gave them a drink and they are safe under the big evergreen out front.
This is the scene after we left with a skinny purse:
They have quite a long drive! They even had a tour bus come up with a group of older ladies. The owner said she’s only seen that one other time.
So we were trying to decide what to do. We always tend to get out after 2 pm and it was 4:30. We stopped at a local church to look for another geocache and came up dry. Wind blown, but dry.
We went down more back roads to one that was suppose to be a quick grab. We had to go in woods, no luck except for a tick crawling up the driver’s seat.
We decided to go to a little town where Brian use to work from and eat in a family restaurant. I can’t believe club sandwiches cost almost $9 each! Wow!
We stopped at a park on the way home and could not locate yet another cache. I was getting bummed! Today I emailed a husband and wife cacher as they found it the same day! They said it was in a grate in the middle of a parking lot hanging off a fishing line! What? I happen to see the grate, peeked in and didn’t see anything. They said you almost had to kneel down to see it. More seasoned cachers know about this stuff. We almost have 300, but haven’t seen a grate one before. We’ve seen one hanging off a wall with fishing line though, but people helped us find it.
To get one blasted cache, we stopped at a Wallie World on the way home. I thought for sure we’d find the lamp skirt one, but there was nothing there! We drove to another cache, didn’t want to go in a wooded area and then I saw where the Wallie World guy had another one. Went back there and I finally found one! One out of six is terrible.
Come on 300!
Waiting on some blood work I had done today to check my Vitamin D level and my parathryoids.
We hadn’t been caching for a week and I was itchy to go look for a few over this past weekend. I hadn’t been feeling good, so was ready for some fresh air too! Saturday I had missed a big Geocaching event and was a bit bummed by that.
We drove over to the Landenberg, PA area to find the ‘Ticking Tomb’. Here is the write up about it on the geocaching page:
Back in 1764 when Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon were surveying this area in order to figure out the border of Pennsylvania with that of Delaware and Maryland, the English King held a contest to see who could develop the best device to measure longitude. Charles Mason developed this device, a chronometer, but legend has it that it was swallowed before it could be submitted for review by Fithian Minuet, who was an infant at the time. He grew up to be a successful clock maker and he and his wife Martha lead a happy life and had many friends. It is said that you could hear the chronometer ticking in him his whole life and that it STILL ticks in him to this day. Many people have put their ears to his tombstone and heard the ticking. Edgar Allen Poe heard the ticking and was supposedly inspired to write “The Tell Tale Heart.” George Alfred Townsend told the story in “Tales of the Chesapeake.” And most recently, Ed Okonowicz included the tale in his book “Up the Back Stairway (Spirits Between the Bays).”
Interesting right? But alas, the ticking sound people thought they were hearing was probably from underground springs and something like rocks and dripping water has shifted as no one is hearing that sound anymore. Anyway, I enjoy visiting the old meeting houses and seeing interesting markers like this:
This was the heart shaped stone that we were suppose to look for-the tomb was to the left of this.
What’s really neat is that we had to figure out the coords for the cache by looking at surrounding markers and to plug in the numbers we got to get the new numbers for the final location. At first we were walking all around the cemetery, in the tall grass too. I looked at the description again and the ending coords were very close to the ‘suggested’ parking. We had parked down the road a bit. So we walked passed the parking lot and the numbers went down. I saw an old stump and looked closer and saw a tell tale pile of sticks and there was the cache! Not that close to the cemetery!
I never found of cache before! I was pretty proud of myself!
This is a neat old place and is used for a nature center. Lots of taxidermy showing thorough the windows.
We then went a little bit down the road to a nice trail with two nicely made bridges and found the cache in a handmade wooden container under the second bridge.
We did go get some pizza after our excursion which wasn’t as good as it usually is. Someone over salted the ingredients in it. Then we looked for one more cache and approached it from the incorrect direction. It was on the other side of a stream we were near. When I got home and read the logs, we were the only ones who didn’t find it! It shows that you have to read the logs carefully. A new geo pal said she’d show me where it is since she found it ‘first’ several years ago. She’s got many thousands of finds.
On a personal note, had a few days bad last week from overdoing it. Climbing in and out of the SUV is rough. I have noticed the bottom of my legs are red, almost like razor burn! And I can’ hardly button my jeans. I decided to ask pharmacist and when I mentioned my legs, he said to call the doctor. She called within a few hours and said I am retaining water and to stop the medicine I have been taking about 5 weeks. I have to wait a week to see if my legs get better and then I will call her back.
I realized it’s been a while since I did a blog post. I’m going to keep this blog as long as possible as it’s a good record for me. I now upload my camera photos right to Flickr and Instagram, so it will be semi-updated there on the sidebar. They won’t have details like my blog, but you can kind of see what I am up to.
So what have I been up to? LOL Well. for one thing, we are climbing up to 300 geocache finds. This is pretty good for someone like me with my issues, but when we go out looking, I tend to forget I hurt sometimes.
Last Friday we went down to historic New Castle, Delaware to look for a few caches. First I wanted to stop near Wilmington to see ‘the biggest cache’ some people have ever seen, this of course is according to the logs for it. Well we found the location and the van-yes, it was the back of a van, like one used for a/c or heating which was near the business where it was parked. We were confused to where the key was to open the cache, feeling around under the bottom of the vehicle for a ‘MKH’-you all know what that is. All we did was knock off rust down there. I finally went into the business and they told me where to look and within a a few minutes we had it! So then we unlocked the back of the van instead of the side-it said to unlock where a certain number was located-duh. I guess we were too excited to see it after all the hype.
Here’s what we found:
This was facing the back. I guess that’s a seat for photo ops! The lights even went on!
Right under this was a big notebook for the log book! There was a travel bug hotel (I was hoping for a bug, but it was empty) and lots of swag.
It was way cool!!!!
We then headed to New Castle and were stumped with a few caches on where to park for them. We had to resort to just picking and choosing off the phone. We did find one near a piling after a bit of a search. The piling was in water and we didn’t feel like falling in. So we took a photo. The cache owner said you have to sign the log, but we can’t be running down to New Castle hoping that the water receded. Finding it was hard enough!
See what I mean? It was mucky all around this area too. You’d need some of those thigh high boots, ‘just in case’.
We snagged a few others and headed to the farmer’s market. We were looking for something to bring home for dinner and found a half of rotisserie chicken and two sides, so bought 3. We had enough chicken for a sandwich the next day! Wow!
Pretty mural near the walkway of the Delaware River
Battery Park coastline near the walk.
The next day was Saturday. We were sitting around and I remembered that a big craft warehouse place in Lancaster County was closing. The discount was up to 60% off and we decided to take a drive there-it would take about an hour. Of course I was again itchy to grab a few caches. We stopped at one called ‘Ghost Train’. It was on an old wooden train bridge. Brian made the find! So proud he saw that one as I was going away from the structure.
We didn’t get to the sale until 4:30 and the place closed at 6:00. I did power shopping. I picked up mostly some Christmas decor and a few Christmas gifts. I got a few things I want to embellish too.
We were going to a smorgasbord, but about 5 lines had 30 people each waiting to get in. And they all will get in and touch all the serving spoons, you get my drift. We ended up retrieving a few caches, one at a tiny cemetery and the other in the parking lot of the restaurant. We had to leave and come back as a full tour bus was right near where we needed to look! They would have wondered why those people were messing with the lamp skirt. Ha ha!
There is a smaller restaurant under the smorgasbord and we ate there. The cheesesteak was a mess! They cut all the way through the bun and piled all this marinara sauce on it. I had to cut it up to eat it as I couldn’t pick it up.
There is a 40k square foot gift shop-it goes on and on! I found an owl wind chime and some Burt’s Bee facial cleanser I needed.
I asked Brian to stop one more time for a cache as I have always wanted to see it. It was an old grist mill in the heart of Amish country. It was getting dark, so I turned on the handy phone light app and although it was 20 feet off, we did find the ammo can.
We had a pretty fun day and found 10 caches in two days!
I think Longwood Gardens will be my next blog post. Sean and I went on Sunday. I have never seen such a variety of tulips in such an array of colors. Here’s a sneak peak!
Well it certainly was a week from hell. We will never know what those two brothers were thinking up in Boston, but I will not give them more thought than they deserve. I know 4 innocent people are gone and almost 200 injured. When the younger one got captured, we had a storm going through, and then sat in the dark for 3 hours. That was really strange.
I was thinking just this past Wednesday how lucky I have been with not getting a cold for a few months. I was sitting in the car on the way to the preschool. A few nights before I had been in a crowded room with up to 30 people at one time. I watched the thermostat go from 67 to about 71! So on Thursday I woke up with my second really red left eye in a few weeks. Yesterday I went down and took my mom to a book sale, so I was around old books and pollen. Today I was walking around outside a little when the pollen count was 10.3 out of 12. I’m asking for trouble! I got it-post nasal drip, congestion and sneezing. Ugh.
We went to our second geocaching event in a year Thursday, a get-together in a Chinese restaurant. We chatted with a few people, but you could tell which people knew each other better. We were given coords for new caches, but I didn’t have my device to plug them into it, and I don’t know how yet. We did go and find about 3 of them that were just in the area-easy ones!
So when I went to mom’s, we went up to my hometown and we ate lunch in a place called Sligo’s. There was some amazing Celtic stencil work in there, so I took some photos of it.
Today we went to church and after we grabbed a few hoagies at Wawa, I asked if we could find a geocache down the road (Delaware). We were lead near a big sign and it was magnetic. Lo and behold it was yet another cool reflector cache stuck to one of the metal supports of the the sign! It looked rather new and it was!
Then we went to find one in a neighborhood park. At first we couldn’t find the entrance and we finally did! It was deserted, so we had the place to look for ourselves. We went right instead of going left and when we got close to ground zero, I saw a weird piece of wood and flipped it over and the box was attached via magnet! Under the wood and under the lid of the box! It hadn’t been found for 7 months. Here is a cool tree we saw near the cache:
I made a nice pork loin dinner tonight. The guys were both working late. Hate eating along, but Brian got in after 7.
We have tickets to go to New York on Thursday to see the Rachael Ray show. I confirmed it-for the third time, but doubt we will go. They made it earlier to check in, so a friend who has seen it said to get there 2 hours before that! So we’d have to get up around 6 am, leave 8 or so, grab the 10 o’clock train and go stand and wait until 1:30 when they let us in the studio! And you are not guaranteed to get in after all that! Sean and I went to see a Philly show, got there late, were last in line and made it to the second row and on tv a few times! We got to see Phillies pitcher Cliff Lee and comedian Kevin Hart. We have no idea who will be on RR. Plus driving there (gas money to a train station in NJ) and the train round trip for two is $60. If we feel good, we may good. It’s really hard to get tickets to shows! I really miss NYC too.
Collages & Creative Goodness 