Category Archives: photography

Oct26

Chadds Ford Great Pumpkin Carve event

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Since we’ve lived near Chadds Ford and enjoy it’s beautiful countryside, we decided it was about time we went to see the annual pumpkin carve as sponsored by the Chadds Ford Historic Society. I mean, 26 yrs is a long time not to see this artistry event. What piqued my interest was knowing an artist pal was going to carving a pumpkin. She’s been doing it a few years as has Bam Margera’s mom (the guy who does stunts, etc on his own show). It’s been an event since 1970 and it’s almost right across from the Brandywine River Museum and the banks of this river too.

This was down our road a bit. We left close to five as that’s when it started. I know after the rain we are expecting in a few days, we won’t be seeing the leaves anymore.

We got there early, we enjoyed walking around several times, but it did get more crowded.

Follow the pumpkins to the event

They had until 7 pm to carve before judging began. I asked if they got to chose their pumpkins and the artist said they got what was there waiting for them.

Jennifer lives near Lancaster. A great artist and photographer. She won ‘Best Halloween Theme’ this year and last  year.

Clever designs!

Ran into three classmates from high school also! Two from my class and one from my younger brother’s class. The three of them were meeting up here.

It got really crowded too. I drove by tonight (Friday) and got stuck in a traffic back up.

This was outside the carving area where a band was playing. They had picnic tables, picnic type food, t-shirts to buy and raffle items. Brian put a ticket in for Eagles football tickets as he and Sean have never been to a game. I sure hope they win!

I’ll be putting all these up on Flickr.  And thanks to Brian for taking most of them.

I went down today and took my mom to a  shopping center. We enjoy The Dollar Tree and a little thrift shop next to it. She then took me for some Chinese that I was able to share with Sean as I only ate half of it.

We are waiting on Hurricane Sandy to come up the coast and she will probably dump a lot of rain from Sunday to Monday. As I type this, she may be tracking in a somewhat different direction, but it doesn’t look good. I will be making some egg salad, etc to have something to eat. We will fill up something with water outside as our toilets won’t flush if the power is out. Keep us in your thoughts.

Oct23

New Hope evening

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After we walked around the woods and found the Doylestown cache, we headed over to quaint Peddler’s Village. It was a bit late and many of the stores were closing. I noticed that the scrapbook store I really liked is gone. They had really nice things. : ( There were some cute scarecrows… See the […]

Oct7

Caching 3 days in a row

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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 […]

Sep16

Hiking along the Brandywine Battlefield

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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

Sep4

First some Potomac/DC greenery

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Gaylord Hotel and Convention Center-National Harbor, MD

Inside the hotel, an interesting wall hanging

A park near the Capitol with a very overgrown bush. Looks like it has multi-beards.

Outside the Library of Congress

A park on the way back to Union Station

Butterfly weed

Very tame squirrel! There were two of them right outside an office building, so they probably got fed all the time.

Aug22

Nice bloomers

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Happy ‘Gotcha’ Day and Birthday to our sweet Cosmo kitty who wandered into our yard 10 years ago. I think someone dropped him off all those years ago. We think he’s about 12 though.

I spent a little time outside again yesterday. It wasn’t as breezy and the mosquitoes were testing me as was a chatty Cat bird. The bird was talking to his friend in a nearby tree. The entire time I was lounging about. I did a little work-moved some plants around pulled some weeds near the pond (and waving to the three current residences -two little and one medium size). I got a book in the mail about Christian Sanderson, the man whose museum we had visited on Saturday. It’s a smallish book, but it was just published this year. All the photos looked exactly like the layout of the rooms as they are now. And I saw where Mr. Sanderson passed away on my 7th birthday in 1966.

I also took a few photos:

Happy with these hanging baskets-Chenille and Nasturtiums. There was something else in there with the Nasturtiums, but they over took it.

The Lantana is a hardy plant. Love the Dr. Seuss type balls of flowers:

The petunias are pretty too with their stripes.

And I  have a serious gnome invasion-they are coming out of everywhere!

I took these with my camera phone. I think it’s a nice one.

Hope to take my mom out to a hometown event they have during the summer called ‘Dining under the stars’. Brian has his orientation at the store tomorrow-you all know what that is-videos!

Aug12

Witness Movie setting in scenic Lancaster County

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Brian and I went out early this afternoon to do some caching in Lancaster county. We stopped at the little town of Atglen, PA as there were a few on the way to the one I was truly wanting to find.  So we stop at this World II Memorial. It was on this narrow strip of land with a flag pole at one end and the memorial and benches and trees. We almost gave up until I saw the hint that said ‘at eye level’. You are so going to crack up. Brian saw a bird’s nest in one of the little trees and I told him it could be a fake one with a cache inside. He gingerly parted the branches only to see a little beak pop up from the nest-yes it was the real deal! Ha! Finally we were standing  next to an outlet box and I touched this thing that looked like a metal cover (light switch cover size) and it moved! I pulled on it and it was indeed the cache! Surprise! The first one it’s kind for us.

We went down the road a bit and found one in a parking lot. Bri lifted this lamp skirt twice-I got out and lifted it and saw a animal skin camouflaged container-bingo! He didn’t look hard enough.

Then the frustration began. I printed out the directions to the movie cache for ‘Witness’ and we didn’t get the signal for it until we stopped in a town and waited for it to load. Both the phone and GPS were wonky. The cache was down this road next to these ‘ladies’ cooling themselves off:

We saw lots and lots of the rolling hills of corn and other crops for miles and miles

See the hot air balloon in the middle. Took this out of the car window.

So we found the cache in a guard rail across from the cows. Brian had climbed over the guardrail and all of the sudden he started going ‘ouch!’, ‘that hurts!’  I thought he stepped on a wasp nest, when in fact it was the plant stinging nettle. A lady and her hubby came along  to fish on the little bridge and she I.D.ed the plant. She asked what we were looking for and we told her. Think she was mildly interested. We asked the guy about the Witness farm and it was down the road going the other way. I remembered to look on the GPS as the cache owner mentioned the address and after a little driving, we found it. A man was  plowing along the corn and Brian said he wanted me to see the farm (being the big Harrison Ford fan). I took this out of the windshield:

Can you picture Danny Glover walking down here when they figured out where John Book (Ford) was hiding out? I read that Sylvester Stallone was offered this role and he turned it down, regretting it.

The Amish guy actually waved to us as we left.

This was actually as we turned in the road to the house.

We then went to a nearby town where Brian worked for a few years and got club sandwiches for either a late lunch or early dinner (4 o’clock).

We went down the road and snagged a large (but wet cache) in someone’s yard and tried to find a well hidden one in a park-nada.

We saw where the Robert Fulton House (who invented the Steamboat) was about 6 miles away, so we went there. It was closed (we peeked in the windows) and walked around their garden. Thank goodness there was a bathroom in the middle of no where! That came in handy.

Where is that blasted cache?

I really wanted to go back to Strasburg, so we did and got some ice cream. One minute is was sunny and 10 minutes later the heaven’s opened up.

Girls in the ice cream shop

We had to wait a bit. A cache was down the road, but after looking around just a bit, I couldn’t find it. I’ll have to go back because I was the only one who couldn’t find it.

Sky over a Dutch market where we stopped for some things

We drove home in pouring rain, yet when we got home it wasn’t really doing anything.

Wednesday is our trip to Philadelphia for the ghost tour. We want to go in early to avoid work traffic and maybe cache a bit! Historic caching. : )

Aug7

Delaware Triple Play

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We are trying to take a little trip a week until the job gods send Brian something. It sure helps us to have something to think about. In ‘the old days’ you ‘most likely’ at least would get a phone call or letter in the mail if they were/weren’t interested in you. Nowadays, if you get an email you are lucky. When I got the store job, I went in and got an application and filled it out, ‘the old-fashioned way’.

Anyway, I thought it would be a great day to go to a pretty park for a picnic. We had been to Lum’s Pond Park many years ago for a company picnic where Brian worked when we first got married. We were trying to remember which area we were in back then and think it was near the entrance.

So we stopped for gas and shorties (hoagies/subs) and headed about 25 miles to the park. We had a few people around, but mostly had the place to ourselves. We sat near the pond and saw so many white herons:

I found this ‘yucky’ cache-it has been there 10 years (Something is eating the tree and it was all over the cache). The lid is broken where the pin goes in and there wasn’t anything good in it…I left some good stuff. We had found one other one (Brian spotted it first) called ‘Wham-o’ as it was near a field where you could use a Frisbee with your pooch.

Like my pigtails-need to keep my neck cool-lol. I thought I looked like ‘Hot Lips’ from M*A*S*H, my favorite show in the 1970s. I appreciated dry humor. : )

So after I got home I noticed that another part of the park had quite a few caches…live and learn. This park will be gorgeous in the fall…we will be back!

After we left here I wanted to do a few along the C&D canal…there’s a ton of them!

I did find 12! I don’t like ‘robot’ caching-they were behind a telephone pole every 500 feet. Helped me to get to 75!

First of 12!

So a guy passed us (it was hard to do on this narrow gravel road) and he looked disgruntled about something. I think he had been in and out of his van 54 times to get these. And he complained about it on geocaching.com. Because of him I wrote it was the 8th instead of the 7th. Why do these and complain?

So next we headed to Delaware City just to check it out a bit. It’s nice there if you can ignore the smoke stacks right before you hit the town. It was a little Victorian style water port at one time. Some of the homes are sweet. Need to go back to check them out closer.

We did see this:

And Fort Delaware…like to go over there sometime as I heard there is a cache there too!

Must take a ferry there

We ate at a place called ‘Crabby Dick’s’. Can’t beat $6.99 Shrimp Poboys and fries. It was one the first floor here. That’s our trusty white Mariner parked there.

And a few parting shots of yours truly and the hubs

And a glorious sunset

Taken from the car