WHAT A WEEKEND!

We rolled out of the Mansfield area on a recent Saturday morning enroute to our favorite, annual, western square dance wrapped nicely in a day's worth of geocaching along the way--both ways.

The dance was the Southern Ohio Round-Up in Jackson, OH--this year themed Christmas in July--with two of my favorite callers Homer Magnet and Jack Pladdys.  This dance, always a high-energy affair, had 12 squares of dancers on the floor to start and there were 12 squares dancing when it was over 2 1/2 hours later.

With 8 folks per square that's 96 dancers reacting almost instantly to any of some 100 maneuvers that can be called in the order selected by the caller.  It was especially challenging when we were dancing to Christmas music and seasonal terms were included as substitutes in the calls.  Pshew.

The "we" in this adventure were Mark and Nancy Meinzer and Sue Brooks.  It was exactly one year ago that day (July 21, 2012) that Mark and Nancy introduced Sue and me to geocaching.

As we wrapped-up that year over the weekend we would be adding eight new Ohio counties I have cached in and about 17 new caches bringing my total up to 1,133 total caches found.  That first year also included caching in 13 US states, a total of 45 Ohio counties and 11 counties in Florida.

My next goal is to cache in all of the remaining 88 Ohio counties.

One of the delightful parts of geocaching is you never know what you will see on your way to the next cache as in the lead photo above.  Mark is photographically enjoying the view of Lake Katherine in Jackson County where we found a cache near a small cemetery just a short walk behind him.

Another navigation technique we used while roaming the eight, southern Ohio counties mentioned was to put the car GPS on the "shortest distance" navigation mode.  This often will direct you along the back roads rather than the big highways favored in the "fastest" mode of your GPS.

As we roamed those eight counties caching in the very bottom of Ohio then back up US23 toward Columbus we were treated to an exquisite, visual visit to rural, Appalachian Ohio, much of the time in the vast area of the Wayne National Forest.

One of the treats we passed by between caches was the original Bob Evans Farm in Rio Grande, OH.  A relatively new feature of the farm is the Log Cabin Village, a collection of log buildings from around the area that have been reconstructed in the form of a small village, giving visitors a marvelous peek at the history of life in colonial Ohio.

 Sue and Nancy are starting their self-guided tour of the village (top) while Sue and the Meinzers finish their peek at the inside of the village school house.   "This two-story log cabin is probably one of the largest original log structures of its kind. It was built near Lowell, Ohio in 1860 and served as a schoolhouse until 1918. In 1986 Wayne Ingles donated the logs to the Farm and the cabin became part of the reconstructed Adamsville Village" at Bob Evans Farm.


Farm History