WHAT A WEEKEND!

We left one recent Friday afternoon and headed to Jackson, OH for our annual weekend square dancing romp with the Wagon-Wheelers and their Southern Ohio Round-up.  We enjoyed dinner at the local steak house down there then danced two and a half hours to the warp-speed calling of Homer Magnet and Jack Pladdys in the Western Square Dance style.

Saturday morning we were off to Logan, OH for a visit to their glassware outlet store where I continued to bolster my Fiestaware collection then headed to the Columbus Washboard Company which manufactures their product from a by-gone era in a factory with tools of similar antiquity.

From there it was on to Nelsonville for a peek through the Rocky's boot outlet where we also pondered an excursion train ride but decided to take a leisurely ride back to Jackson for another night of high-energy dancing with a stop along the way deep in the wooded hills of Vinton County for Sue and my first-ever experience with Geo-caching led by our experienced traveling companions Mark and Nancy Meinzer.

Nancy used an application on her smartphone to lead us up an ascending, curvy, gravel road where we ultimately wound up in a ridge-top cemetery at the very dead end of the road where we found the cache via the miracle of GPS satellites and their precision in spotting very specific latitude and longitude coordinates.

The washboard and Geo-cache stories will appear here on back to back Saturdays in the following two weeks..

After yet another nice dinner and two and a half more hours of heart-pulsating dance we wrapped up the night with an ice cream treat and collapsed into an alarm clock-free night's slumber.

Sunday morning we took the back roads home using state routes 93, 664 and 13 to meander our way to Newark, OH and a visit to the Hopewell Indian Mounds where we discovered a huge area of destroyed trees from a recent storm that had left me without power for five days back home.

That's Sue, Mark and Nancy in the top photo framed by the splintered remnants of a huge, hollowed out tree trunk which had fought it's last battle with hurricane-force winds.

As we examined its remnants we discovered it had retained its relatively healthy looking canopy solely by virtue of the small, rooted "artery" of essential nutrients that had snaked up the rotted inside of the now toppled tree (left).

 From there it was on to Utica, OH and the home of the Velvet Ice Cream Company for another treat of that tasty dessert--and two more Geo-cache experiences right there on that company's park-like grounds.

The first cache was along a nature trail and contained in a camouflaged, bulk food container.  The second was in a hollowed out duck decoy which was perched atop one of the antique machines in Velvet's outdoor museum.

Please stay tuned.  Meanwhile, I need another nap as my recovery continues.