This gallery contains 14 photos.
Back on July 20th we were looking for a day trip to go on and I saw that Elk Creek State Park had a lot of water around it and was less than 40 miles away. We had never been there before and only knew the lay-out from the internet. There is the Turkey Point […]
It’s one of those weird, weird summers. First we had rain, rain and more rain! (Gee, all these multiples means I am making a point maybe?) So now it’s been the heat which has dried up the mucky yard, but the veggies have suffered. Weeds are everywhere!
A bright spot in my yard with 3 locations of these beauties:
Star Gazer lilies look like they may be difficult to grown. I have two pots with the bulbs in them and they sit outside all winter. Actually one pot is about 6 years old and the other is new-both Star Gazers that look a bit different. The first photo are ones in the ground. Their aroma really defines July to me (other than the smell of firecrackers!).
We were down at a park in Maryland yesterday. We had wanted to go to Ocean City, NJ, but didn’t get up soon enough. Elk Creek State Park will be my next post. And it will be an interesting one, I promise!
Now I will share some beautiful old buildings with you from near where we live. I am pretty happy with my Samsung cellphone’s photos. We have had their tv for a number of years and love it. The only thing that the phone does is to start to flip between screens if I overdo it with the photos. I am sure I’ve taken at least 300 photos since March.
This is The Blue Church (1832) in Springfield PA.
This building, which is now the oldest standing church building in Springfield, came to be known as “The Blue Church” because Lownes had constructed it of blue Pennsylvania limestone, which turned a shade of blue in wet weather.
This is in an area where there are shopping centers on both sides of the road, so a busy very modernized area here. I know a FB pal’s pal got married here.
This is Walden School in Upper Providence township, PA. It was called Sandy Bank school (1836) for many years. I went here for kindergarten, 2nd and 3rd grade. Kindergarten was in the basement. When our day was over, it turned into the lunch room. I have many memories of using the red tablets that stained our teeth so we saw where we were missing in the brushing department. Also loved the seesaw and playground. Being able to draw Snoopy in 3rd grade and having the other kids want me to draw for them. Listening to the teacher read Pippy Longstockings. Kids making fun of my speech impediment. Having the teacher yell at me for sucking my hair (ugh). The coat closet, a room in itself and struggling with boots-the kind you had to pull up over your shoes. Awful.
St. Mary’s Chapel (1873), Exton, PA
This happen to be the little church my husband Brian was baptized in. His parents said he cried a lot as baby and having him in church didn’t make a difference. We were in the area for my MRI (I have another post about my back to do) and we stopped by a few places and this was one of them. This little chapel not only had a geocache behind it, it had an Entenmann’s outlet store next to it!
This is also off a very busy road near a mall.
Across the street:
The “King’s Highway” was originally laid out in 1690, as an east-west thoroughfare enabling people and goods to move from the Philadelphia area to Lancaster. In 1791 it became a toll road, known as “The Lancaster Turnpike.” Along this busy thoroughfare, James Bowen erected an elegant tavern known as “The Ship Inn”. Across the street from the Inn stood a fine, gray stone livery stable first built in 1793, where those lodging at the Ship Inn would house their horses.
This is said to be haunted!
And last but not least, The Kennett Inn, a few miles from where we live:
The Kennett Inn, originally founded in 1835 was renovated in 1927 as “The Green Gate Tea Room “during the era of prohibition, then in 1976 the Inn was restored with great care to present a formal dining room and colonial tavern with hard wood floors, cherry tables which preserves its history with a friendly small town hospitality.
A few days ago, Geocaching.com offered a ‘get outdoors and geocache’ souvenir if you found a cache on July 13th. It is added to your souvenir page almost like a stamp collection!
Brian was at work and I was trying to find an interesting cache to look for. I found one located near Wooddale Bridge in nearby Delaware. It was big enough to add a travel bug or swag to. I wrote down the directions which were 3 turns. So of course the GPS on the phone went out (I need to use my GPS device and upload caches to it!) so we went by my handwritten directions. Thank goodness. Brian was getting a little perturbed as he thought the bridge was closer. Opps…maybe 7 miles away. So we found it-no other cars were around, so we could take our time (mostly me) looking. It wasn’t hard to find at all! Yes!
Isn’t that a nice bridge? It was constructed in 2008.
See that big hornet’s nest on the upper left?
Look at all the raging water from all our rain.
The cache wasn’t too difficult to spot as it wasn’t hidden well. I hid it a bit better. You never know who is going to come along.
I hadn’t signed it or added the little Eagle with the travel bug attached to it.
Driving back we stopped the Mount Cuba Center and drove up their long drive. We saw this gorgeous mansion at the top. It belonged to the DuPont Copland family!
This is just used for administration and an educational facility now!
We decided to go up to Kennett to check out a new cheese steak place. The night before, the place was packed! When we got there, a bike race was going on and the middle of town was portioned off.
See the racers whiz by!
We walked down to the new market place and there was indeed a cheese steak place, a crepe place and seafood area and a wine seller. We decided not to get a sandwich as we had a burger the night before. We ended up in a Mediterranean place and ordered a cheese tray (very skimpy and no crackers) and salads that had lots of greens, but little of anything else for the price. I always wanted to try it, so now I know the dinners ‘and’ salads are pricey. Nice waiter though.
Some shots from around quaint Kennett Square, PA
Sean is good at taking me places where I show an interest in. I did a google search once on ‘shopping in Lancaster’ and Stoudtburg Village came up. He had off last Saturday and he said we could take a drive up. It was over an hour drive and we saw lovely farms and scenery.
The village itself wasn’t very busy and it was quite warm that day. The shop owners buy the building and live above the stores! I like that idea! So we started to walk around and went by a lady who was about to prop open her door. I advised her against it and then we started to talk. She let us see her ‘courtyard’ or garden which was really pretty with the purple and lime green. She wasn’t going to open until the 19th and let us to see her store. She had awesome antiques and I loved the boater hats like my great grandfather William use to wear (as seen in photos).
This was outside ‘Plum Pludding’ if you ever want to visit.
We looked in a few stores, one being a candy store and I got my mom her favorite ‘Black Jack’ gum and some Violet candies I liked.
We went to the antique mall area there and the lady said she was going close in 5 minutes. There were a few other people in the mall and I think I would have kept it open a little longer so we could enjoy looking around.
I mentioned a multi cache that was located in the village. We found the first one pretty easily. The hint lead us to a sitting area and there were people sitting on their balcony. The lady said she knew what we were poking around for and we looking in the right area. I saw a sprinkler head and it was a big sprinkler for such a small area. Sean pulled on it, but it didn’t budge. Then we looked more and were about to melt when I went over to the sprinkler and turned the top and the coordinates to inside. We just couldn’t find the third one on foot. We even drove around. I do believe we found the north coordinates. We looked a long time for this cache. So I have the numbers written down to look for it in cooler weather. The town is suppose to be an antique mecca, and I’d love to go look around there again.
This was the antique mall with nice murals….
Sean wanted to see a preserve near by and we saw the sign, but not much of the preserve, except for the residential area. We did go by the craft warehouse place that recently closed where I enjoyed shopping a few months ago.
We ended up at the Park City Mall in Lancaster and I got a Salads work and Sean a burger. By then I wasn’t feeling that great from the heat and while Sean shopped a bit, I sat down.
So we could record finding a cache, we stopped at a McDonald’s as the cache there was very popular. The cache was a bird house in a holly bush!
We also stopped for this:
I could only eat half!
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.
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.
Collages & Creative Goodness 