Saturday, May 15, 2010

Virginia Day Trip

Two brothers I was friends with in Junior High School managed to find me via searching on the Internet: Jim and Steve Dean. I've moved several times, but this is a special case - we were in Frankfurt, (West) Germany attending Frankfurt American Junior High School! I hadn't seen either of them in about 25 years, so I was looking forward to meeting up again.

I drove down to Stafford, VA to meet Jim, and we drove onto Mechanicsville, VA (outside Richmond) to visit Steve. I brought one of my yearbooks, and Steve had his collection out as well. It was fun catching up on the years, and meeting Steve's wife and kids.

Jim mentioned he and Steve had picked up geocaching, an outdoors hobby I was into when I lived in WA but let slide in FL. That's because I couldn't imagine poking around bushes and going off trail (a little) in FL where there are snakes and spiders and so on. :) So we planned to look for a few while I was there - we found four, putting me at 99 finds total!

One spot had two caches nearby - the Pole Green Church. It is an interesting story, but what caught my eye was the church itself - there isn't anything left but the brick floor (and I'm not even sure that is original). To help people visualize the church, what is there is the outline of the structure, windows and doors. It looks odd, like a floating mirage, at least to me.


Historic Pole Green Church
Originally uploaded by klbarrus



We had a good time finding the caches, spending a few hours walking around trails in nearby parks.