Category Archives: sightseeing

Mar27

Daytrippin’ on Brian’s bd

Posted on Wednesday, March 27, 2013 by Dianne

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See Abe Lincoln?

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

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

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

Next post-Roadside America!

Mar15

Tracing some the steps of SLP

Posted on Friday, March 15, 2013 by Dianne

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After seeing ‘Silver Linings Playbook’, I was itchy to go down to that area to eat in the Llanerch Diner where the characters Pat and Tiffany kinda had a date and then to see the house where the movie was filmed. And then if I was really lucky to hide a geocache along that particular street there.

I went to my hometown which is about 5-6 miles from where I was headed. I got my mom and we stopped off at the cemetery where a geocache was. It’s also where my maternal family is resting. The cache was around the bend from that area and I got out of the geomobile and left my mom there. It was an area with a few evergreens and bushes. I got to 17 feet away and I swung around to see a tree that probably had broken off. I looked in and low and behold, I saw a film canister! Yay, less than 5 minutes of looking. I hustled back to the car and told my mom since we were here, I was going to walk over to the family plot. It took me a few minutes to find it, but I did and was sad to see it faded a lot from the sun-it was a pink marble.

Got back in the car and headed for the diner. I was taking some shots with the phone camera of the sign:

and when we were being seated, the lady lead us right to the booth where Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence sat! I didn’t even ask her where it was. But this told the tale:

My mom looked cute when she poised:

She had a little trouble taking a photo of me-this was the best of 4

I liked the asparagus/Swiss Cheese Omelet I had, but mom said her pork chop was a little tough (I think overcooked-I never order pork chops out as I have trouble enough cooking them myself).

The next stop was the avenue where the house used in the movie was located. At first I went the wrong way, but it was right down from the diner. Then I wasn’t sure which house it was. I remembered them all walking up to the front door and it had pillars made of stone with the thick cement in between. Mom thought a lot of the homes were built in the 1930s. I think I saw the house when we drove by after looking at a newspaper article online and the opening credits of the trailer.

So it was fun to see all this and I also hide a ‘premium’ geocache as I didn’t want too many people coming here at once and it was just a little nano with a tiny log. I’m waiting for approval.

Update-The reviewer won’t grant me permission to place the cache as he says I need approval from the people living near it. What? It’s not on private property and not near the SLP house.

Mar13

Exploring Philadelphia

Posted on Wednesday, March 13, 2013 by Dianne

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This gallery contains 14 photos.

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

Feb7

Well isn’t that smashing?

Posted on Thursday, February 7, 2013 by Dianne

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Sean and I have had colds this week. He is sicker than me, but still is plugging away. I thought I’d be blowing my nose like crazy, well I have done that enough, but it’s the achiness that is getting to me. I wanted to do something distracting, so I pulled out my ‘Smash’ book. This is a book I bought over a year ago. A smash book is like a scrapbook, but you ‘jam’ more stuff into it. I tend to be a little more organized than that. Here is what I started out with:

That’s one of those fold up organizers I am using. The stuff in the top wants to fall out all the time.

This is my ‘Abbey Road on the River’ spread from when we went to the Beatles tribute event in Aug./Sept. 2011 and 2012. We saw the guitar that George Harrison is posing with in this photo. I got a catalog in the mail and lo and behold, George was on the cover. I really liked the shot, so I used it in my Smash book.

I have a paper I hand wrote near George that tells about the Beatles tribute event. The pocket has the programs from the two years that we attended plus a postcard and bookmark The little ‘Peeps’ picture is because they are a sponsor. We probably won’t go again for a while as we weren’t happy with the way it was run last year.

It’s hard to believe our New York trip was almost a year ago! I wish I felt like I did back then. The left side has a bumper sticker from the 9-11 Memorial store-seeing that was a big thing. There’s a receipt from the store and the little envelope holds a card describing the purchase of a metal cast leaf I bought (the tree will grow at the sight). The next page is a happier one-Sean holding an umbrella next to Radio City Music Hall (we had a bit of gloomy visit the first night and day and then it got chilly and windy); a card from Tinsel Trading Company-a store I wanted to see that sold millinery and crafty things; and the description of the caramels I bought from Dylan’s candy bar. Oh…the mustache is from the Lorax movie! He was visiting at Dylan’s.

Brian took me to see the Van Gogh exhibit at the Philadelphia Art Museum around April 1st. We weren’t allowed to take photos of the exhibit, but I took plenty of shots around the museum. The one on the right is from the mailer and that’s the the pamphlet of from show. When you open the pamphet, A Rembrandt card (shaped like him) is there-see his foot? We saw a few of his works of art, plus I bought this in the gift shop.

In June, we had our Delmarva trip. I met up with a internet pal Rachael and we headed over to the art museum to see the Andy Warhol exhibit. It was great to meet her. I bought the Andy card in the gift shop (the Rembrandt one looks like this) and some postcards of his most famous works.

The last page I worked on yesterday was about the November election we went to see both the First Lady Michelle Obama (in August) and then President Bill Clinton a few days before the 2012 election. I have the email about picking up the tickets, the tickets in the holder, stickers and some ballot ends.

So on the health front, I’m still fighting these body aches and fatigue. I seem worse since I have had the cold. I missed work, but heard a bunch of others called out sick on Wednesday too. My cold wasn’t what made me feel blah-it was the body aches! I got an appointment at a rheumatologist office at the beginning of March. I googled about menopause and arthritis and didn’t something come up! Seems there is a parallel. I am looking into going to another doctor specializing in hormonal issues. At this point, I can’t hardly do anything without having to sit down in half an hour. I’ll probably call the doctor near my hometown later. I want to be able to add more pages to my smash book!

Keep my mom and brother in your thoughts and prayers as my brother’s Dalmation Baxter appears to be at the end of his life. Mom thinks he’s at least 13 or 14 (maybe older). He is in a lot of pain, it takes him 5 minutes to lay down and he has hardly any bowel control at this point. He is on medicine, but yesterday he was just so miserable. Such a sad time.

Oct25

The highest point of Delaware

Posted on Thursday, October 25, 2012 by Dianne

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Since Sean had a night class on his birthday, I took him out to a late lunch to The Olive Garden, one of his favorite restaurants. I always mention geocaching to him and he doesn’t mind checking out a few of them. His phone works pretty good pinpointing the cache.

First we went to one in a series of shopping center caches. It was near a pretty line of trees and a golf course.

It was a quick 5 minute find next to the fence (on the ground) that separates the shopping area from the golf course.

We then did a little shopping in Marshall’s-they always have good stuff. I got a little ornament display piece with an owl on top and last night hung most of my Halloween balls on it. I got a big box of Susan Branch greeting cards (she does homey watercolor art) for $3.99-there are 40 of them!

So the next stop was Best Buy, but I stayed in the car and browsed Geocaching.com. I saw there was another cache around the corner and it may interest Sean because of his college classes.

We get to the cache which is also the highest elevation in Delaware! A lady drove by and asked if we were ‘high markers’ and I was trying to be inconspicuous and of course said ‘yes’. Well low and behold her mom is into this organization and before we knew it, a 79 yr old lady came walking across the street.

Taken by Miss Doreen (her photo is halfway down-in pink).

Doreen gave Sean articles about the high mark society. The founder is suppose to have his ashes at each marker! Down the road is a big tower that was used for communication between DE and NY.

So that was an interesting stop to say the least! Sean said he could certainly use the info for some research.

And the cache was a nano on a bench-no problem finding that one-different than Sunday!

Oct23

New Hope evening

Posted on Tuesday, October 23, 2012 by Dianne

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This gallery contains 13 photos.

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 […]

Oct22

Bucks County Scenic Adventure Part 1

Posted on Monday, October 22, 2012 by Dianne

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This gallery contains 9 photos.

I am so lucky to be married to a guy who will pretty much take me on little trips at the drop of a hat. Saturday night I was saying I’d love to see if the leaves were changing up a few counties over and he said we could certainly take a drive up. It’s […]

Sep16

Hiking along the Brandywine Battlefield

Posted on Sunday, September 16, 2012 by Dianne

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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

Sep5

Caching around DC

Posted on Wednesday, September 5, 2012 by Dianne

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Before we went the 10 miles or so to Washington, DC (on the 2nd) We went to find a cache in a neighborhood near National Harbor. You could tell it had been there many more years than 4 years like the town. I’m pretty sure it’s Oxion Hill, MD. We drove by a Cirque du Soleil tent. That would have been fascinating to see. Did I mention it was raining? So we pull up to the area and I see a fence and guardrail. Sometimes I get so excited to find the cache, I forget the hint and things I have read about it! Plus I am getting out of the car in the rain in a strange neighborhood. Brian and Sean stayed in the car. I looked along the fence and turned around-the GPS showed it was close to the road-come on mush brain-it’s the guardrail! And there it was! I brought it back in the car and dumped it out and stuck a travel bug in it, then squeezed everything back in.

Didn’t I get a tick on me from this 5 minute caching! All the times I’m in the woods and I find a tick on me in a neighborhood!

I was checking out the phone for another cache and brain fog set in again! Brian had said he needed gas and drove by a nice gas station looking for another cache. We turned around as we thought we missed the road and as we approached the station again, the numbers went down! He had decided to skip the gas and it was there at that station-rats.

We got to DC in about 20 minutes and the hardest part was finding a place to park, next to the crazy streets there. We had to get ourselves around to the back of Union Station and then we did park on the roof of the garage. We looked around the station a little and the guys got coffee. We headed out to look for the caches (marble brain #3 episode-2 hours sleep just doesn’t cut it for me).

So we walk toward the Capitol. It is quite a sight. Oh, I’ve seen it in 5th grade (been in it also) and seen it many other times, but to see it from other angles is amazing.

Getting close to the Capitol

So here it is in all it’s historic majesty!

The only problem-I forgot it was a ‘virtual’ cache until we looked around a park nearby-that was a waste of time because are they going to let you put a box next to a historic place like this-really? Anyway, when I figured it out, I was suppose to take a photo of the other side, where the Presidents take the oath of office! Grrrr-well, I had seen that area too, and I am sure a kid in my 5th grade class fell down in that general area (I’m talking 1970) and Cam broke his leg! It may have been Arlington, but it was in DC. I told the C.O. what happened on geocaching.com and he didn’t say anything.

The next was also a virtual and within 10 minutes I remembered something about turtle eyes in the questions. This was across the way from the Capitol at the Library of Congress. Another issue was I had forgotten my geocaching bag with the GPS device and my phone’s battery was going. It was making the screen darken up. So I looked at the description again and answered the questions. The turtles were in a fountain near the sidewalk. The ‘authors’ were along the top of the building show below. That was all we did as we were tired and had a 6 block walk back to the car.

We grabbed some pizza and headed home. Well we started to head home and I mentioned that DC Cupcakes was in Georgetown. We tried to find that for almost an hour-Sean’s GPS took us to the incorrect end of ‘M’ St. When we located it, it was 6:30 and it was hopping in that town with limited parking with no place to park in the area of the shop. But the shop was going to close at 7:00 and there was a line going out the door! For cupcakes! I guess because they have a tv show and all. I am going to make my own cupcakes for the fellas after all that running around. And we want to go back to Georgetown-it looks like a nice place, similar to New Hope in PA.

So again we are on the road to home-we are going through downpours every 5 miles or so. I then mention a easy virtual cache in Baltimore-you just get info from a memorial. We get off the exit and run into traffic and roads that we had needed to take being closed. No baseball game, but Sean remembered there was a Nascar show there and they were letting out! We never got near the cache and ended up going through an ‘iffy’ part of town. We were all getting tired of city driving. Did I tell you how awful it is to drive in DC? This was pretty bad too.

I’m glad we stopped, but I would have liked to see the President exhibit at the Madame Tussand Museum, which I didn’t remember about until we got home. Not a good day for remembering anything! I truly do research my cache hunting well and things go smoothly-most times. Big city caching is harder! There aren’t a ton of box caches, but there are a ton of virtual ones to be found-in the future.