This gallery contains 8 photos.
Today, Sean and I had a late start going out. He had some school work to do, so we rolled out of here about 3:30. I had asked him earlier if he would like to go to a cache I’ve wanted to get to for a while, but we ended up going down to the […]
This is a National Broadcast Radio story about Kennett Square, PA.
In the late 1800s, two Quaker farmers from Kennett Square, flower growers, went to Europe, where people were already farming mushrooms, and they brought back some spores. They started growing them. A few Quakers or their descendents are still in the business today.
There’s a penetrating smell in the air, not exactly a rotting smell, more like fermenting. Tractors are rushing around like bees in a hive, turning and mixing giant steaming piles. -The priest from our church once said ‘that’s the smell of money’.
Chris Alonzo says it used to be really helpful having so many mushroom growers so close together; it made them all more efficient. But we’re so big now, he says, we’re trucking in hay for compost from a hundred miles away. There’s not nearly enough housing that our workers can afford. Maybe, he says, this mushroom capital of the world has gotten too big.
Dan Charles, NPR News.
Since it was indeed international EarthcCache Day, I ‘really’ wanted to participate. I dropped the shoes sorting, etc but we first went to church. Unfortunately, there were only about 3 in this immediate area. Most of these are near mountains, which in Pennsylvania are up near the Allegheny or Pocono Mountains.
So we went to church and the priest said indeed he had given me a recommendation for my job. Yes! We headed to the one near the White Clay Creek, got very close and the bridge was torn up before the turn we were going to make! Rats! We wasted 30 minutes. This was one I hadn’t printed out a paper anyway. We headed to Delaware near Wilmington and the Brandywine River. We were on a time crunch as Brian had to be at work at 3 pm. We got there about 1:40 and were just blown away by the area! An old mill had been converted to condos!
The fall foliage is just starting to turn
We were standing on a foot bridge here.
Then we headed to the Wilmington Blue Rock cache. It’s amazing!
This is suppose to be a horseshoe shaped gorge. It’s so grown up, I didn’t realize it had that shape until I got home The rock is way in the back.
We had to answer questions about the Bancroft Mills (above) and the colors of the natural rocks in the gorge.
We had to rush a bit and got home with only 20 minutes for Bri to eat and change!
Today Sean, our adult son, (he is a grad student studying GIS-mapping) joined us for a little geocaching outing back to Southern Chester County. I got an email notice that a Halloween themed cache was out there and fairly new, so we decided to see it. (First we stopped at Saladworks for lunch). We got there and it was a very small cemetery and where the remnants of small church had been. Sean had his phone and I had mine….the GPS was a little jumpy but I saw both a big tree and a trio of bushes-hmmmm….so I peeked under the bushes and there was something all covered up-kind of weird as it was in a cemetery! Brian got under and pulled it out and uncovered it-yikes!
The ‘little guy’ sat up when the lid was opened! The most clever cache we have seen! Thanks!
Of course I needed to look for a few more caches. The area is getting swamped with housing developments, but this was a pretty area near the Little Elk Creek, that flows into Maryland.
So we encounter this bridge…again the GPS is jumping between both sides of the bridge. We get within a few feet and it goes up. So I look at the hint and it says ‘near the plaque’. Then it’s a piece of cake.
We all posed here-lol
I like that the ‘guy’ above me said ‘construction, found by accident’
We then ventured to an Old Meeting house from about 1862. The place was in bad shape, and we tried as we might, even inside, we didn’t spot the cache. I think it was missing. We took more photos and the two inside the meeting house came out a bit out of focus-from the phone camera and the Canon. Spooky!
All the windows are shuttered and the foundation must not be good as there are huge cracks and the windows aren’t straight.
See how blurry this one and the one of Sean and me are?
We then went toward the town of Oxford and I remembered there was one near a florist shop. We stopped and I found it quickly as I had seen photos of where it was, though I think it was changed.
We drove down past where I thought my pal from high school lived and we saw his house! There were a lot of cars in the drive, but I know they have a few. When we got home, Brian read where John’s mom had passed away today. : ( It’s like we were drawn to that area as something was going on. Deepest sympathies pal.
We went and I got the yummy pretzels from the Amish place, but the place in general was going to close in 15 minutes. We also went in the new Walmart and got a few things we needed (and Sean gets a discount). There was a Chinese buffet and we got take-out and brought it home.
So it was a nice day. I am a bit achy from changing out my summer clothes to winter clothes. I am still working on that. Plus I brought in plants. I am not sure if I am going to save the coleus, maybe I’ll take cuttings. I also got a flu shot a few days ago, and that may be a side effect. I went down to take my mom and she had a runny nose and got one anyway. She woke up yesterday feeling crummy and she has a full fledged cold. : (
I may do yard clean up tomorrow!
Got email about a Best Buy needing a person to demonstrate the Keurig coffee maker for 4 weekends before Christmas…thinking about it. But that’s 8 hours on my feet and my back is still bad. I have to go back to the chiropractor to find out about my x-rays and what treatment I may need.
It was the third Wednesday in a row I got up at 7 am-boo hoo right? It’s really hard for Ms Hoot here!
The first day was the magazine job and of course now it’s the preschool ‘assistant’ job. I am not the main teacher, but I seem to be the floater-go where they need me. I’ve been in with a lovely lady named Charlene who leads the 3 yr olds. I said my son was turning 26 and she said she had a 42 yr old son! Wow! I thought she was younger than me! She also has a granddaughter. She was concerned about getting a flu shot and I said it’s not a bad idea. I will probably get one along with my mom. The children are cuties, some boisterous boys of course. : ) You can tell their little minds are going faster than they can move their lips! Today one of the assistants came in and showed them sign language for a number of farm animals. They were all fascinated! They paid attention for almost 15 minutes. The rainy weather has held them in a lot this week, so I could tell by just seeing them the one day a week I do that they have pent up energy. I suggested rugs for them to sit on for story time and they have plastic dots of different colors to use instead. That worked a bit. I think I would have put the circles down first and then let them just sit down on one instead of pick one. That caused a little commotion. I’m surely learning about children all over again!
I did a little Halloween home decorating for a few days on Monday and Tuesday. I’m not finished, but I have an ‘owl theme’ going on here. I didn’t realize I had so many! I need to take more photos, but I tried some without a flash. I am still having hip/back issues and need to see what’s up with the x-rays.
Brian took me out for a Jake’s burger tonight and asked if I wanted to find a geocache or two. I never turn that down-lol. I looked at the phone app and there’s a cute farm series around this area and there was an orchard we hadn’t hit, so we went. First we bought apples and a ‘ghost’ pumpkin. I mentioned the geocache to the lady and she knew where it was and I said not to tell me. I wanted to mention this to her as it was closing time. The cache was in a tree from the 1860s under a bunch of ivy!
We found the dairy we visited a week or so ago and got some toasted coconut ice cream and butter-all on the honor system. It was after dark and the door was open. I am sure they have a camera on the place-I wrote down what I bought, put the money in the cash box and got my change. The ice cream is delicious too!
Hope to see my mom tomorrow!
This gallery contains 19 photos.
I’m counting my solo trip to Tweed’s Tavern in the trio. Brian had off on Friday, so we headed south to the Oxford, PA area. Brian use to work out of an office there, but we didn’t go near the town, but another town, Lincoln University which has a college and upper Oxford, more in […]
Yesterday I saw that there was a new cache located up in the next town over. I quickly got dressed and went out the door. I got to the area and went wow! It was in a memorial garden with a pretty moderate traffic flow. It’s a good thing the butcher/deli was closed today. I had the car pointed right in front of the cache, only had to cross the street. I got to GZ and it’s a big rock with a plaque on it commemorating the War of 1812.
Below this were pebbles, in the front of it about a 30 foot long garden space, like a tapered triangle filled with roses, etc. I ‘evaluated’ the area and felt a lot of eyes on me. I looked at the traffic pole and street signs-they were really tall….and the fire hydrant.
So….
I went to the chiropractor at 2, a younger Alex Karras (remember him) kind of guy. I lifted, he lifted…thinks my left hip is out of alignment. I will get an x-ray soon. His receptionist is a nice wheel chair bound lady with a big black, fluffy service poodle.
We decided to go look for some caches (Brian’s day off). We headed to a local park where we had found a ammo-one of the first ones. Well this one was a bugger….near lots of rocks, branches and cement ruins of something. We almost gave up and I kicked a rock and there it was- looked like a playing card box! The log wasn’t in a bag and it was wet and icky.
I asked Brian if he wanted to try the one from this morning and he said ‘why not’! So it was around the corner and he zoned in on the fire hydrant and again there it was-‘our’ first to find in geocaching! How cool!
Tiny!!!
So we were sitting in the car and a truck pulls up next to us. The guy motions to roll down the window, so Bri did a bit. He says, ‘so you found it?’ It was the cache owner! He said he had read my entry and was going to put in a hint and we told him not to. It made sense it was on the fire hydrant. I don’t know how he would put it on the plaque itself.
We headed to Applebee’s and starting talking about geocaching to the hostess-she knew all about it and her brother had hide the one we had just found in the park! Small world.
We headed for another cache down the pike, but it looked like too much brush to tackle. We tried a gazebo one again, no luck. We didn’t check one spot where a busy yellow jacket nest was-good thing!
I found another listing down a back road and part of a orchard/farm series. The Navigator took us to a back road, but we saw a field of cows.
The GPS said it was 1/4 mile away-the main entrance to the dairy. We drove up and there’s a little barn where they sell their goods, on an honor system (mostly). We were told this later. We didn’t have cash at this point or a check. We’ll have to go back as I saw coconut ice cream! : ) The man there knew about the cache and we thought the place was closed, but he let us look. More people came along anyway to buy goodies.
The cache was down between two fenced areas. One side contained two sheep (we got sheep kisses) and the other side was goats and sheep. They were a little interested in us for a while, but we didn’t have food, so off they went.
I think that’s the cache pole!
It was on a corner pole! I had to lean over to unscrew the bison tube and retrieve this.
We went to a park near here too-it was getting dark, but we found the container under an evergreen. I had to chuckle at the logs of seasoned cachers complaining about this one. It wasn’t hard to find…big babies! : ) I see a few names of my new pals on this log.
I see I need to burn a CD for my geocache computer folder. It’s taking up a lot of room! My phone made me clean out a few apps too. Sean never had that problem when it was his phone.
One for the road! Moooooooooo!
It turned out to be a nice day here in the low 80s-almost perfect for a picnic! I have been having lower back issues for a few days and it really began bothering me after that 2+ mile walk last weekend. I thought my feet were going to fall off after the trail walk, then we kept going and that final walk up the hill at the Brandywine Battlefield did me in. I did start to house clean my kitchen a few days later, but I have been wearing those ‘walking shoes’ all summer by Dr. S. I think they are throwing me off too much. I plan to get new sneaks soon.
So anyway, after I used the heating pad, we headed to the picnic, not too far away. It was so neat to match those cacher names with faces! We talked to people who work right near my garden cache hide in our town. Another nice fellow, got a hint from me about that same hide. He had told us about a hide in a sign down the road.
The couple in the green had travel bug shirts on-I logged them. I am up to 14 as I got some off of cars and they had a big bowl of them and I took a couple and left one.
Here’s helpful Tony
I find it amazing how cachers know so much detail about the caches they have found, even when they have found thousands of them-wow! I noticed that a lot of them are left-handed too. We had a bingo game where we had to mingle and ask people if this was ‘their first event’, or ‘they cached in a snowstorm”, etc.-and they added their name to the appropriate box. I was able to say ‘first time at event’, ‘did over 5 challenges’ and ‘have a travel bug on my car’ (that was put on yesterday). When we got all the boxes filled in, they went into a drawing. We didn’t win anything. : (
The park is so pretty! And get this the ‘owner’ is the host of the event as he is a cacher also!
Waiting on the door prizes, etc. Didn’t win, but two of the people in the first photo with me did win. They had a few ammo boxes there too.
Signing in…should be above the last one.
They had burgers, hot dogs, bbq chicken and pulled pork along with mac and cheese, broccoli salad and cole slaw. The soda was out of dispensers, mistake-it was like yellow jacket heaven.
We could have gone tubing, etc. They had a large chess and checker boards too!
The animals were staying put in their shelter.
Cute sitting area
I got a few travel bugs off of cars
Brian and I came home and changed and decided to go down to California Tortilla for dinner. We looked for a cache behind this area-an evil one….a fishing line hanging off a metal fence that is about 300 feet long. We knew we were expecting rain, and felt drops as we looked and looked-they gave up.
We went in the restaurant and got very yummy fish tacos. So we are watching the now pouring rain (and got stuck in it going in) and I see two ladies come in from the picnic! They order their food and they see us and came and sat behind us. So we found out they were caching in that shopping center and got the ‘evil one’ earlier! I told them we had been looking for it and they said after they ate, they would help Bri and me. So true to their word, they drove around to the back (one has a white PT Cruiser!) and they had to really look for it again and helped us find it! Crazy hide. I may have some lady buddies to cache with-both in their 50s and live in the Wilmington area. Cool huh?
My nails
Geonails!
On Friday Brian and I did a little local caching down the road (got help from Tony above) a few towns over. The one down the road was so tiny and easy to miss. It was a tube about 1 inch long! I was too short to get it and Bri barely could.
We went to West Grove, PA and the cache was near an ice cream shop. The GPS bounced from one side of the street to the other. It bounced near mailboxes-I didn’t think so. We got some ice cream and was asking the lady if people ever asked her about Geocaches, and she said she really didn’t know what they were when people did ask-so they did! So we told her about it and if I found it, I’d show her. So lo and behold, I walked by this metal tube thing on a telephone pole, but there were cobwebs over the top and I did find the keybox stuck inside-right near our car (right opposite the mailboxes). And I did show the lady at the ice cream parlor. Every piece of paper for the log was rolled in a ball, so I smoothed them all out. Very strange.
We then went to a park where there was shredded rubber tires on the path-wonderful to walk on.
Nano on the fence-Bri has a good eye for them!
Then we went to a Quaker meetinghouse/cemetery. It would have been nice if the CO had put the cache under a step (see in photo), but they stuck it under rocks in a wooded area in the back.
We’ve had a couple of busy days!
Today (now it’s the 23rd) is my mom’s birthday. We’ll be seeing her shortly.
We have lived in the Brandywine Valley for 26 years and are surrounded by the rolling hills of this area where the great battle that defeated the Americans by British and Hessian troops occurred on September 11, 1777. So almost to the day, but 235 years later, we took some time to check out this area while we did some geocaching.
I always route out our geocaching excursions and try to keep them to a few hours and close by. Of course I should count on some taking longer than others, which was the case for a few of them yesterday. We looked for 9 and found 7! Not to bad for 4.5 hours. Some had us walking through terrible high grass and prickers and I get itchy and nervous because of ticks and bees. However, the first one left us ‘stinging’ all day and evening. The cache was a few miles away in a roofed sign post. Underneath here, but no place else, was a big patch of Stinging Nettle. We saw it and tried to avoid it, but it found us! Ouchies. We should have gone home to take care of that, but we didn’t do that. And no cache to be found. The same person hid this one and the one down the road that we never found (though someone told me where he thought he found it, just haven’t gone to look again).
So the next stop was a ‘dog park’. We think we missed the entrance and parked near a back entrance to a business along Rt. 1. We had to bring along a liter of water. There was bushwacking from the road and then some to the cache, leading me to think we missed the entrance. Always nice to see this:
We had to cross a little platform and climb up to an area that use to be fenced off as Brian spotted the cache below.
We were to fill up the PVC pipe with water and the bison tube on a float was suppose to come up to the top-there was nothing in there. Bummer. The cache owner knows about it, but it would have been neat to see this happen. Brian even questioned if it was the right thing-we saw nothing like it and the GPS went to like 8-10 feet, so I think so. LOL We did count it as a find.
The next cache lead us to the Birmingham Quaker Meetinghouse. It was actually a Letter box, but I forgot my rubber stamper. It was hidden in a cut off tree’s big stump.
Look at this octagonal building on the property. It looks like someone lives here.
Then we looked around the road to where the next cache was. We were to take a 0.8 mile hike to find it (a multi-cache-but we never saw the sign for step 2). We could have driven that, but we knew the cache was in a hollowed out tree along the way, plus who wants to drive? I would eat those words coming back, but we had a mostly nice walk seeing a heron, horses and blue birds.
See the heron taking off?
Bee keeps!
Bri retrieving the cache along the trail
The last leg back, while enjoying the frolicking bluebirds was very hard on my feet. Brian however made a new pal!
After I revived a bit, I remembered the house from ‘Marley & Me’ was around these parts. We didn’t see it yesterday, but it was within a few thousand feet of the Brandywine Trail cache! Rats!
Then we did a ‘cannon’ run. The first one was right down the road from the above.
The nano (micro container) was under the mount on the other side.
Another nano on this one. I didn’t take out the log in the first one as it was too tight, but as you can see I did with the Vietnam Memorial one.
We ate some Arby’s and headed for a few more!
Can you see the green bison tube? This was called ‘Twin Towers’ although the other one like this is gone now. Not sure what this was part of in the past-wells? Anyway, as we walked up near this in terrible overgrown weeds, etc. A snake fell down on top of the cache! Then he slivered back up inside! Eek!
Next we found one in a hollow of a tree in a neighborhood park. Finding the park was the hard part!
So it was getting dusky and we were about to pass the Brandywine Battlefield park. I haven’t been there in years. In fact, my memory of it is as a toddler getting yelled at for floating a Styrofoam cup down a stream! I think this is that area…
Sean’s been there for school, but we only drive past it coming home from my mom’s house. We pulled in and there is a big hill to climb. They had the parking roped off, but people were still there taking walks. We got to about 350 feet and the GPS wanted us in the grassy area. I couldn’t win with not going in tall grass today. It was even darker in there and we think we needed to go in the woods higher up, but we decided to quit (past post mentioned animal carcasses, etc). We saw an overturned ‘ancient’ outhouse and one of those broken benches with cement sides. Very unexpected and why don’t they get rid of them?
And a pretty sunset was to be witnessed
There is a little gem of a park on the property of Oakbourne Mansion in West Chester, Pa. I’ve been to the glorious mansion a few times for a craft sale. It was nice to walk through the big rooms and check out the crafts.
We came to find a cache in this whimsical ‘water tower’. The cache was on the outside, but I really wanted to see this amazing structure.
This was near the back here…Brian spotted it first. His only find of the day. I found the rest-hee hee! They say that bats live up in the eves here. We didn’t see them or their ‘guano’.
Then we walked down a path to find one near a pond. We happen to meet a lady coming out of the woods from a hike and she pointed us to which we thought was the right direction. Well if we had gone straight down a road, we would have avoided a root covered trail. We got some exercise and when I see beautiful natural spots like this:
I am in awe of how pretty it is!
There were suppose to be turtles around, but we didn’t see any. : (
The cache was behind the pond. We went down the wrong path at first. I am so going to write stuff down after I read the posts. We did have to bushwhack a bit and I spotted the cache almost out in the open. It didn’t have much in it, so I added a nano travel coin and swag.
So we went after cache three in this location and it was opposite of where we had just been. We could have driven around to a different entrance, but walked down another road. I am pretty sure we walked by a half way house. There were some guys there with shaved heads standing around outside, just hanging around. I was a little nervous. There we were at that pretty place and then come across this group. They didn’t say anything…right away. We heard one say ‘walkin’ in the woods’. So we looked around a basketball court area and noticed an old stone wall. The cache was a ‘pole’ and we didn’t see any pole except for the basketball hoop. Brian saw a path and we went down it. Then we saw a pole which happened to be the ‘the pole’. I saw some wood piled up around the bottom of it-yep, that’s a sure sign it’s hiding a cache. There was a little bison tube hanging there! I didn’t take a photo of it as my battery was going.
We walked by ‘those guys’ again and headed to a cache near where my late uncle lived. It was placed by a big new electronic billboard. I got out and looked first, but there was a fence up with narrow planks and I couldn’t see on the other side of it too well. There was a long silver nail hammered near one fence post and I swore that was where the cache was suppose to be-think it was a decoy! When I got home I saw where people were dodging sprinklers, so it must have been on the other side of the fence!
We were heading home thinking Sean needed me to make dinner, but he was going to the town where his school is to meet up with his girlfriend. So I said I wanted to see this:
I needed to frolic in them!
I saw a local artist on Facebook who had a photo of himself painting these. Spectacular!
Since we were in that area, I saw a cache that looked fun and cute. We drove a few miles and we found it quickly. I like creative caches!
The cache was the egg! Ha ha!
Traveling down the road we did a cemetery cache that’s been on my list for a while. Gee cache owner, thanks for putting that one way on the other side-near the road. It was neat to read the different stones, some very old.
Look at this marker! I was in the car and saw this and jumped out to get a shot of it!
Actress Linda Darnell is in this cemetery. She passed away in 1965, being a fire victim.
We went and grabbed a roast beef sub and headed to ‘just one more’ even though it was 7 pm.
Thanks to the previous logs, I knew the bees were gone from a cache, but it took 3 lamp post skirts before we found the pill bottle cache.
The night wasn’t over though. I had a cache to hide. I went down near where we go to the doctor and dentist as I saw a great area to find one. We get there and a guy was snoozing in his car. My GPS wasn’t coming up, so we drove around to an upper parking lot. We went down to the first lot and the guy had left. I guess we scared him! I went for a guardrail instead of the lamp skirt. I came home and put up the cache for review. Within a few hours it was up and someone had found it already!
So we surely had a fun afternoon finding 6 out of 7 caches!
Brian is still learning at his job. He had someone call about stocking stores with magazines. He said he’d think about it, but I went online and applied right afterwards. Why not? A pal said she did it before and enjoyed it.
Such a sad day of remembrance for our nation. It’s hard to believe that 11 years ago, our lives were changed forever. Seeing the memorial back in February made the events of that day real and surreal.
Collages & Creative Goodness 