This is the last of three posts about our weekend trip to Maryland for GeoWoodstock. The first two parts can be found by clicking the following links.

Seeking and Finding

Seeking and Finding, Continued

We got up on Saturday morning excited about GeoWoodstock. After a quick breakfast, we loaded all our gear for the day into the van, locked the doors and started walking across the parking lot. What? Haha -- there was a geocache hidden just a few feet away from where we were parked and we'd been too tired to look for it on Thursday night, forgot about it on Friday morning, and too tired again Friday night. I'd seen a fairly steady procession of geocachers casually wandering around a particular spot, so I was pretty sure we could find the cache even without my GPS. Most parking lot caches are micros (only enough room for a small, folded or rolled slip of paper to sign), but this cache was regular sized, which is a medium cache large enough for quite a bit of swag (trading items). It's also listed as a TB Hotel and I'd carried a couple of Travel Bugs with me from Michigan and wanted to leave them in a TB Hotel instead of checking them into GeoWoodstock.

With the Travel Bugs taken care of, we were ready to head out to the Washington County Agricultural Education Center near Boonsboro, Maryland. It was a fabulous venue for Geowoodstock, with ample parking near the action, pre-existing buildings and pole barns for vendors and other uses, the Rural Heritage Museum, and a recreation of an early pioneer village. Brett changed into his Waldo costume and we walked up to the satellite dishes that were the hub of activity. Waldo was immediately mobbed by people wanting their photo taken with him. I convinced them to all gather up for a group photo.

Warning: lots of Waldo photos ahead!

The activity around the satellite dishes was threefold. The paper log book was located on a table next to the largest satellite dish. The paper log is so organizers can get an idea of the number of people present. There were also several Sharpies on the table for signing the large satellite dish, which was the official GeoWoodstock XIII log. There were four or five smaller satellite dishes set up around the big one and people were milling around them. We found out later that they were part of one of the LAB Caches. Murisopsis and Old Dog Sparky soon found us and we strolled through the vendor area admiring at some stuff and shaking our heads at others. I wish I'd gotten one of the cache containers we saw, but by the time I decided to do it, they were sold out. I stopped often to take photos of people with Waldo or trade pathtags with other collectors.

At a little after 10 AM, we followed the crowds gathering on a nearby slope for the group photo. There was a wait as the GeoWoodstock letters were placed, the photographer was raised in a bucket truck and everyone was asked to scoot a little to the left. We thought we would be at the edge of the photo, but there were a LOT of people there and we ended up pretty far in from the edge. This is a low resolution photo from the GeoWoodstock XIII Facebook page. The four of us are at the top of the slope above the "K". I'm waiting for the high resolution photo to come out to see if I can spot us.

Waldo was so popular, he began deliberately hanging back from us so we could take more than three steps at a time. Val and I found a lady from Canada walking through the vendor area and got the last squares in our Bingo cards filled and turned them in for the door prize drawing later in the afternoon. We started working on the LAB caches and I continued to trade pathtags with people. At some point the crowd around the large satellite dish thinned out enough for me to sign it for myself and Brett with our geocaching names - saintvi and waldowalking. Meanwhile, Waldo was still getting stopped for photos.

When we were ready for lunch, Brett took off the Waldo shirt and we got our ice chests and food bags out of our respective vehicles, found some picnic tables and enjoyed a lunch filled with laughter. Since skipping the gadget cache the day before because of all the geocachers grouped around it, Brett had been trying to think of a word for a group of geocachers. You know, like a herd of cows, a pack of dogs, a murder of crows, etc. During lunch, Val said something about people being in collusion and I looked at Brett and said, "A collusion of cachers!" So that is our contribution to geocaching lingo, if only I knew how to make it widely known. We also learned a new vocabulary word from Val: Wenis - the skin on the outside of the elbow. Brett had us (okay, mainly me) howling, snorting, and crying with laughter as he started describing his wenis. It's been a while since I laughed that hard!

After lunch we continued working on the LAB Caches and Waldo kept getting stopped for photos and I kept trading pathtags. Here are a few of Waldo's celebrity encounters.

Emmet & Waldo

Stoner dudes, Sparky & Waldo

Little Heiskell & Waldo (and photobomber). Little Heiskell was actually one of the LAB caches.

Waldo and Max B. (a celebrity in geocaching circles)

Secret Agent Matthew and Waldo (Waldo's favorite celebrity encounter of the day).

Waldo, Signal the Frog, The Blooming Idiot, and The Jester

We call this a Collision of Characters.

As you can tell, we had a really fun day. In spite of applying sunscreen in the morning and reapplying after lunch, I got sunburned, mostly in odd little places I missed with the sunscreen. I've been rubbing Noxzema on it and the itch and sting are already gone. We stayed for the closing ceremony and the announcement that next year's GeoWoodstock will be held in Denver, Colorado on July 3rd. That causes a conundrum for us, as it would be our 25th annual 3rd of July Party. We'll decide what to do eventually.

After leaving the Agricultural Center grounds, we made our way over two of the scary, one-lane, humpback bridges that seem to be on all the back roads in that area, to a pub in Boonsboro for dinner.

The next morning, Brett and I packed up the van and left Maryland. We made a quick stop at the rest area in West Virginia and got that gadget cache. By the time the cache was opened, there was a collusion of cachers gathered around it. We got home around 9:00 that night and I was finally able to take a look at my pathtag score from GeoWoodstock.

SWEET!!

My personal pathtag did not lie; I had a blast at GeoWoodstock!

On Friday morning, we planned to drive down to southern Maryland, stopping at the Thomas Stone National Historic Site before continuing to St. Mary's City. First, however, I wanted to make a quick detour to a rest area just over the state line in West Virginia. I'd done some research before we left and it appeared there were a few really good caches in the rest area, which was only eight miles from our hotel. I hadn't told Brett my plan yet, but by a quirk of fate he met a geocaching couple from our our area in the hotel lobby before I made it there for breakfast and they told him we shouldn't miss those caches. So off we went to West Virginia to add that state to our geocaching map and see these caches everyone was talking about.

One of the caches was an Earth Cache, which is not a physical cache, but a location with some sort of earth history attached. Usually the lesson is included on the cache page and there are some questions you have to answer (to prove you were actually at the location) before you can claim the cache. This one was at a water garden.

One of the caches was a simple "tupperware in the woods" cache. The rest area was crawling with geocachers in town for GeoWoodstock and bikers headed to DC for Rolling Thunder. The geocachers were doing GeoWoodstock type caching; somebody finds the cache and a line of cachers forms behind them waiting to sign the log. The log book gets passed from hand to hand along with instructions on where the cache should be replaced. It's not really very fun to geocache that way. The third cache was one that we managed to get to when nobody else was around it. It was a typical looking birdhouse, except a crescent moon had been carved in the front, turning it into a miniature outhouse. When we opened the door, this is what we saw:

The cache container was inside the outhouse, but I won't tell where. The final cache was a gadget cache. It was another birdhouse with a combination padlock attached and we had to figure out the combination to get the cache. There was a crowd of people around this cache and they were making no headway, so we decided to skip it and maybe come back later to give it a try.

When we got back to the van, we entered the address of the Thomas Stone house in our car GPS and it said it would take two hours to get there, and we found it would take another hour to get to St. Mary's City. We had planned to spend a couple of hours at the Thomas Stone house and maybe three or four hours in St. Mary's City. If we did that, then drove three hours back to the site of GeoWoodstock, we would miss the pre-event Meet & Greet. So we ditched our plans and all of my geocache research and went instead to the Civil War battlefield at Antietam, West Virginia.

We'd been there before and it was just as pretty and peaceful as I remembered it. We stopped at the visitor center and ended up purchasing a National Parks pass good for a year, which should come in handy when we take our big cross country road trip in September. We visited the Dunker Church and looked around a bit of the battlefield, then decided to mosey over to Harper's Ferry, one of my favorite places.

With our new park pass, we were able to get into the National Park Visitor Center for free, park in the lot and take a shuttle bus down into the town. Our first priority was lunch. We found a BBQ joint with "patio" dining. The patio appeared to be the open basement of a long gone building that used to sit behind the restaurant. We ate outside in a basement, with the street a flight of stairs up from us.

After lunch, we walked over to a footpath (actually part of the Appalachian Trail) that led to a railroad bridge over the C&O Canal. We walked across the canal on the pedestrian path attached to the railroad bridge. Even though it was probably not much more than a mile round trip, I can now say I've hiked on part of the Appalachian Trail.

Next, Brett wanted to hike up to Jefferson Rock, above the Catholic church. I looked at the map we'd received at the Visitor Center and decided there was no way my knees could handle that hike, so I handed Brett my camera and went to the bookstore while he hiked up to the church and beyond.

I think I made a wise choice. Brett enjoyed the view, but he was panting and sweating by the time he made it back down to the bookstore where I was waiting with a handful of postcards and a cold bottle of water.

Since we were so close to Virginia, we thought it would be a darn shame to not add that state to our geocaching map, so when we left Harper's Ferry, we headed to a little town just over the state line. The first cache we tried for must have been disabled because when we couldn't find it I tried to pull up the details on my phone app and the link wouldn't work. That usually means the cache has been disabled for some reason. The second cache we tried for was a high difficulty rating. It was on the dining deck outside a pizza place. We looked for a while and I'm pretty sure we located the hiding place, but hadn't yet penetrated the camouflage when somebody wandered out of the restaurant with a plate of food and sat down to eat. For our third attempt at a Virginia cache, we went to an old church with a cemetery behind it.

Cemetery caching is not the best idea on Memorial Day weekend, as the cemeteries tend to be unusually busy at that time of year, especially when there are veterans going all the way back to the Revolutionary War whose graves must be marked with little U.S. flags. We managed to dodge the flag crew with their clipboard and hundred or more flags and finally found a cache.

During all our wandering around three states, we wondered whether murisopsis and Old Dog Sparky had arrived in Hagerstown yet. We thought we would all be in the same hotel, but when murisopsis called, she said they were actually booked in the Hampton Inn across town from the one where we were staying. She also told me with a quaver in her voice that they had missed the deadline to register for GeoWoodstock. Not that you have to be registered to attend, but you have to be registered to purchase anything from their online store, and everything from their store sells out by the time GeoWoodstock rolls around. I knew what the problem was. Murisopsis loves pathtags, little coin-sized metal medallions with artwork on them. Brett and I each had pathtags for trading at GeoWoodstock. I'm not gifted in drawing, but if I have a concept, Brett can make the design. Here are examples of pathtags.

At some point, a GeoWoodstock planning committee realized the fundraising possibilities of pathtags and they started offering an official event pathtag with each registration, and selling a set of six pathtags depicting iconic images of the area where the festival is being held each year. For some reason, I felt compelled to order two sets of pathtags when I registered Brett and myself, so I was able to give murisopsis the extra set of six, and since Brett doesn't collect them (he'd designed the Waldo one for fun and gave them to me to trade), he gave her the one that came with his registration.

There were also game sheets in the registration packet, including a Bingo card for the ice breaker. We had to fill up the card completely by getting signatures of geocachers (only one per cacher) for different scenarios. For instance, I could sign the box that said, "Required medical assistance while geocaching," or the one that said, "Got your vehicle stuck in mud or snow while geocaching." Murisopsis could sign the box that said, "Took a picture of a bear or bobcat while geocaching." She was helping me get signatures because I was slowed down by trading pathtags along the way. At some point during all the handing of papers back and forth for signatures, I ended up with an extra blank Bingo card and murisopsis happily took it as her own and began to get it filled in. We had a lot of fun, met a lot of people, and the next morning we both got the last squares in our cards filled ("Live outside the USA") and dropped them in the box for a prize drawing later that day. Neither of us won, but playing Geocacher Bingo is always a highlight of GeoWoodstock for me.

This post has gotten pretty long, so I'll continue our adventures tomorrow.

Bookmark61 and I got home last night from a four-day geocaching vacation. We left Thursday morning and drove from Michigan to Maryland for GeoWoodstock XIII. The drive out was cool and damp through Ohio, then wet and foggy through Pennsylvania and into Maryland. We stopped for a few geocaches along the turnpike in Indiana and Ohio, but they were pretty boring caches; mostly magnetic key holders or pill bottles hidden in guard rails. I'm no geocache snob; I don't mind micros (tiny caches not big enough for swag), or nanos (super tiny caches) as log as they are hidden in a fun way or at an interesting location or accessible by a pretty hike or bicycle ride. The hikes to get to these mostly involved dodging semis in the truck parking areas of the service plazas. All of that to say, we got bored with turnpike caching and the weather was disintegrating so we gave up on caching about halfway through Ohio and got serious about driving to Maryland.

Somewhere early in the trip, Brett asked me what we had in the bag of snacks. I started listing things and he wasn't responding, so I grabbed the bag to look. He asked, "What else is in there?" I pulled out the baggie of Chex Mix and said, "Homemade pop tarts, Pringles, peanut butter cookies and... hmm... something striped." There was a box in the bottom of the bag wrapped in striped paper. "What's that?" he asked. "I don't know," I replied, "I guess I'll have to open it and see." It was an early birthday gift - a Sony Cybershot DSC-HX300 digital camera. It's 20.4 mega pixels and 50x zoom. Just the right speed for someone who is comfortable with a point and shoot camera, but wanted to take photos that are richer, sharper and better overall quality. The next time we stopped to stretch, I took the camera with me and tested the zoom on it. Here is what we could see with our eyes.

Just to the left of that larger white building was a tiny yellow dot. "Can you read that sign?" Brett asked. I squinted into the viewfinder, zoomed in on the sign from about a quarter-mile away and read, "STOP AHEAD."

It's blurry because I had the lens extended as far as it would go and I didn't have a tripod with me. I thought that was pretty darned impressive. I spent a good part of the next couple of hours trying to read license plates on vehicles that were ahead of us on the highway. I also took a shot inside a tunnel in Pennsylvania. There really is a light at the end of the tunnel!

So far I haven't had to edit the sharpness, color temperature or saturation of any photo I've taken with this camera.  That makes me so happy!

We arrived at our hotel in Hagerstown, Maryland a little before 9 PM and ate tuna salad sandwiches in our room before taking showers and collapsing into bed. This post is already getting too long, so I'll continue later.

It's feeling mighty blue around here.

And a little white.

A couple of months ago, we thought we'd never see color in our yard again, much less walk barefoot in the grass.

Two days ago I found a recipe online for homemade pop tarts. I printed it out thinking, "One of these days I'll give this a try." Yesterday there was a long thread on Facebook about pop tarts. It's sort of like the universe was telling me, "Melinda, look at this delicious pop tart recipe. Okay, if you're not going to follow through, look at this long conversation about pop tarts. Melinda, MAKE THOSE POP TARTS!" So this morning I made pop tarts for breakfast -- from scratch.

The recipe is unnecessarily long, mainly because it includes a pie crust recipe. Whenever I make a pie, a make a triple recipe of pie dough and put two-thirds of it in the freezer, divided into two, gallon-size Ziploc freezer bags. So I just grabbed one of those bags out of the freezer and let it thaw. Voila! Three-fourths of the recipe done! When the pie dough was thawed, I divided it into two balls, rolled each ball of dough out into a rectangle, and cut each rectangle into smaller rectangles. I put half the small rectangles on a parchment paper lined cookie sheet and opened a jar of homemade strawberry jam. I put a dollop of jam in the middle of each dough rectangle, spread it out to within about a half-inch of the edges of the dough, covered each jam-covered rectangle with one of the remaining dough rectangles, pinched the edges closed with my fingers, brushed the edges with water and then pinched them closed with the tines of a fork. I placed the cookie sheet in a 375 degree oven and baked for 25 minutes. Here's what they looked like when they came out of the oven.

Next I mixed up a simple powdered sugar/vanilla/milk glaze and spread over the top of each tart. I then sprinkled each one with nonpareils (commonly referred to as sprinkles, but I didn't want to write that I sprinkled the top with sprinkles because it sounds redundant). Here is what they looked like after glazing and sprinkling.

Not as pretty as the store bought version, but way, way better tasting! I ate two for breakfast. Be jealous.