Out and About on D-Day

There is an overnight backpacking trip in the offing, but that is a story for another post. As to how that effects this, well, there are new hiking boots in my possession. Boots that perhaps require a bit of breaking in. So despite the fact that these new boots are a Father's Day present from my girls, and technically I shouldn't be receiving them for another couple weeks, I put them on (with proper spousal approval), laced them up, and set out on a brief Sunday morning hike. I chose a portion of the Rocky Run Trail, adjacent to the Darlington Trail that I have hiked earlier. In addition to a nice easy walk, I could pick up a few geocaches, which is never a bad thing. In order to clear out the last few caches in this park, I hiked two different little sections. As always, cache locations are black squares and parking spots are orange squares.


Overall, I was very happy with the boots. They are Merrell Moab mid GTX boots, which are very similar to what I already have, but are mid tops with a bit more ankle support than the low tops I have now. They were extremely comfortable right out of the box, and were light enough that I pretty much forgot I was even wearing boots instead of my usual trail shoes. For our trip coming up, I don't have "new boots" concerns. I have lots of other concerns, but not about the boots...

After getting back to the house and hanging around for a while, there wasn't much going on, and Grace mentioned going geocaching, so I decided on a spur of the moment road trip with my two little geocachers. One of the more recent manifestations of my geocaching obsession is to collect as many counties as possible in the state of Pennsylvania. A quick look at a map showed that we could hop in the car and be in Lancaster county in about a half hour, so that's exactly what we did. We went out Route 1 to Oxford, then went west on 272 until we got to Little Britain township, where we made 3 finds in Lancaster county. With a couple hours of time to kill, and feeling ambitious, we headed west on 272 and then 372, and in the picture below we are crossing the Susquehanna River on the Holtwood bridge on the way to York county.


In the picture below, my two little cachers are posing in front of the Holtwood sign near the Lock 12 historic site.


...and here is historic Lock 12. I do love old stuff, and this well-preserved lock was fascinating to me. I am still amazed at the narrowness of it. We did pick up a cache within a hundred yards or so of here, which crossed York county off the list, but to oversimplify it to that level would be misleading. One of the great things about geocaching, as I have said before, is that it gets me and the girls to places that we probably never would have gone without the extra impetus that geocaching provides. This would be one of those places, at least for them. Hiking Kelly's Run across the river will bring me back at some point, as it is a favorite of Leo and Dave.


One last site that amused the girls on the way home - Octorara reservoir. They didn't think passing over this little lake was a big deal until I told them that Octorara reservoir is the primary source of water for the Chester Water Authority, which pumps water out of this impoundment, processes it, and then pumps it to, among other places, our house. So my girls have now seen their drinking water, which they thought was pretty cool.

Another unexpectedly fun and adventurous day! So I think that's about 6 counties done and 61 to go. Wow, that's a lot of work left to do!