Happy 45th Anniversary, Ouch My Back Hurts.........and a Good Day with Tim & His Family 5/25/2008

I got up this morning early, of course that's not news, and drove down to Wegmans to pick up some flowers for my lovely wife seeing as it was our 45th year of being happily married. After breakfast Tim had 6 yards of topsoil delivered so I helped him and Melissa spread it and we got about 4 yards of it done and saved the rest until Monday. I showered and watched the Indianapolis 500 and the Yankee-Mariners game with Tim. Tim and Melissa had some friends over for a cookout and Mom and I went out to eat with Ceil & Mark Pigula. We went to Casa di Copani seeing as that was the only Italian restaurant open and we were dying for a good old Italian dinner. Well I'm still dying for some as my lasagna was lousy, big time. Must have been the holiday weekend but it really shouldn't be an excuse. After dinner we came back to the coach and sat with Mark & ceil for awhile and chatted and they left and we went out and sat with Melissa & Tim and their friends for awhile and then I turned in and Mom watched TV for an hour or so. Well not much happening these days so until tomorrow we love you all.

Beautiful Saturday in Camillus and a Little Caching 5/24/2008

Well finally the weather turned warm and the sun was out bright and shiny. We ate breakfast and loaded a few caches into the GPS and we were off with Muffy and Raggs. The first cache we did was a multi located in Camillus Park near the town swimming pool. We found stage 1 quickly and then walked down into the woods to find stage 2. Next was a cache located behind Byrne Dairy but we couldn't find it as the coords were off about 125' after reading the logs when we got back. The third cache was in Woods Road Park in Solvay and we found that one quickly and then spent some time looking at the monuments and memorials. The last cache was at the NYS Fair grounds under a rock near the Women's Bldg. We went back to the coach and had lunch and watched the SU vs VA lacrosse semi final game. Then I showered and Mom did our cache logs. We had a great dinner with the Faulkner's of Camillus as we had pork roast, potatoes with veggies, bruschetta, and tomato with mozzarella cheese on it. After dinner we watched TV for awhile and I hit the hay about 10:00. Well until tomorrow we love you all.

Arrived at Tim's Safe and Sound 5/23/2008

We were off to Camillus and Tim's early this morning as Anna and Kaitlyn wanted a ride to school in the Coach as they thought that was the next best thing to peanut butter. We dropped them off and we were on our way to Camillus. We got to Tim's about 11:00 and got unhooked and set up and then ran a few errands and stopped and saw Mark and Sandy. We got back and had dinner with Tim, Melissa, and Erica as Nikki and Rosie were out. It was great to see everybody and they all looked good. After dinner we watched TV for awhile and I turned in early, as usual. Well great to be back in CNY and we love you all.

A Even More Miserable Day Than Yesterday in Apalachain 5/22/2008

Well today turned out to be even lousier, if there is such a word, than yesterday here in Apalachain. It was very cool, the high 40's, windy and rainy off and on. We decided rather than sit around all day we would go out and see if we could do a few caches after Mom had taken Anna to school. We loaded them in our GPS and off we went. Our first cache was right down the road from Scott's house at a diner, the next one was at a Subway store around in back, third was one in a rock wall and the last one we did was a six part multi-cache located mostly in Vestal, Endicott and Union. It took us around on a driving tour to 5 locations that played a part in the history of IBM. It took us about an hour to drive to the locations and get our information and once we got to the final stage location I recognized it as the old Heritage Golf Course once owned by IBM where Scott and I had played many times before. The course is still there but it is under the name of Traditions at the Glen now and they have built a new clubhouse on top of the hill. It is also the site of the oldest home in Union, NY and was built in 1800 by Arnold Oliver Crocker. It was a nice cache to do as it was interesting and made you think. After finishing that cache we drove back to Scott's and had lunch and Mom watched TV and I did our cache logs. Mom went to pick up Anna and it was time to go to the lacrosse game with Corning East. Well the game didn't turn out as good as the day beofre as Binghamton lost 10-4, but Scott was happy with the way they are playing going into the playoffs a week from Saturday. We stopped at the Spiedie & Rib Pit on the way back and got sandwiches for dinner. We got back and ate and I went to bed and Mom watched TV for a little while. Well time to say until tomorrow from Tim's house we love you all.

A Do Nothing Much Day 5/21/2008

It was another wet, rainy, dreary day in Binghamton so we didn't do an awful lot today. Mom washed clothes and I washed the car and cleaned out the inside of it. Just as I was starting to clean the tar and stuff off it it started pouring rain again so that was it for the day. Have to finish another time. We had hamburgers and hot dogs with Scott and the family and Mom had made a chocolate cake so they all enjoyed that for dessert. Anna slept with us in the motor home tonight as she slept with Mom and Muffy, Raggs and myself slept on the fold out couch. She did well and only woke up twice Mom said and she loved it. Well time to retire so until tomorrow we love you all.

Arrived Safe and Sound at Scott's House and a Great Game

Well after a miserable drive through Pennsylvania we finally made it to Scott's house. The drive through the Scranton area took us about an hour longer because of road construction in 3 separate places. There were 3 different places on Rt 81 that they had a lane shut down doing patch work and the traffic backed at each place about 2-3 miles so it was stop and go all the way through. We got here about 1:00 and unloaded the car, had lunch, chatted with Rachel for awhile then put some caches in the GPS and headed for Scott's lacrosse game in Horesheads, NY. On the way we found 6 caches, 3 of them in cemeteries, one at a boat launch, one in the woods in a rest area on Rt 17 and the last one in a monument in Elmira. As we arrived at the game it started to rain but it quit by the time the game started. Great game as Binghamton upset Horseheads 9-7. They played great on defense and the goalie, who wasn't even their starting goalie was spectacular. After the game we drove back to Apalachain after stopping at Wendy's and getting dinner. We chatted awhile with the Scoot, Cheryl and Rachel and then I was pooped so I went to bed and Mom followed me shortly thereafter.
Something interesting I came across relating to our visit to the Antietam Battlefield and the Dunkard Church in the battlefield was about the people who built the church "The Dunkards". The Dunker movement began in Germany in the early eighteenth century. The peace treaty that ended the Thirty Years War ( 1618 –1648 ) recognized three state churches. Dissenters were persecuted and forced to meet in communities where some degree of tolerance prevailed. In 1708 the denomination was formed with the baptism of eight believers by full immersion. The name Dunker derives from this method of baptism. However they were more commonly known as the German Baptist Brethren. In 1908 the official name became Church of the Brethren. Because of the church's prominence in the Battle of Antietam, many believe that the Dunkers were the dominant religious denomination in the Sharpsburg area. Actually, they were a very visible, yet prominent minority. The original settlers to this region in the mid 18th century, were the so called "Pennsylvania Germans" or "Deutsche" (Pennsylvania Dutch). These people arrived in the early 1700's and settled in southeastern and south central Pennsylvania before moving into western Maryland and the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. One misnomer concerning the Germans is that they were all "Plain People" or "Sect People" (Members of the Dunker, Mennonite or Amish sects). While it is true that the first sizable influx of Germans were Mennonites, these so-called "Sect People" were a minority. The large majority, as many as 90 percent, of the Germans that came to the New World were known as the "Church People," members of the Lutheran and Reformed Church. So it was with the citizens of Sharpsburg and the surrounding countryside. Thus, while some noted area families such as the Mummas were Dunkers, most of the other farm families were not. Dunkers practiced modesty in their dress and general lifestyle. Other Christian principles which the Dunker's stress are: pacifism, members both North and South refused military service; the brotherhood of man, including opposition to slavery; and temperance, total abstinence from alcohol. A typical Dunker church service supported their beliefs in simplicity. Hymns were sung with no musical accompaniment from organ, piano or other instruments. The congregation was divided with men seated on one side and women on the other. The churches were simple with no stained glass windows, steeple or crosses.
Also we found out about The Mumma Bible. Daniel Miller who owned the famous "Cornfield," donated the leather bound volume to the Dunker congregation in 1853. A short time after the Battle of Antietam Sergeant Nathan Dykeman, Company H, 107th New York, took the bible. It remained in his home in Schuyler County, New York until his death in 1903. Dykeman's sister decided to return the bible to its rightful owners and sold it to the veterans organization of the 107th New York. They in turn gave it to Mr. John T. Lewis, an African –American who had migrated to New York in 1862 from his native Carroll County, Maryland. Lewis was a convert to the Brethren Church and returned the bible to the Sharpsburg congregation in 1903. Later, the bible came into the possession of several church members for safekeeping. It eventually was acquired by the Washington County Historical Society and donated to the National Park Service. Today the Mumma Bible is on display in the museum of the Antietam National Battlefield.
Well time to say until tomorrow and we love you all.

Windy & Cool Day in the Appalachians & A few Caches 5/19/2008

We got up this morning to a nice bright sunny day although it was a bit chilly so we loaded some caches into the GPS and off we drove. Last night was another night where we heard cannon and artillery fire from Fort Indiantown Gap Military Reservation as they must have been having night maneuvers and the booms could be heard very clearly inside the RV. As the morning progressed it got cloudy and very very windy, which of course made it seem a lot cooler than it was, and it started to sprinkle on and off. Our first cache was a Earthcache where we visited Swatara State Park and drove into a fossil bed where you could look for fossils and keep anything you could find. We got out and soon we had located 2 different fossils to complete the cache. We took pictures and marked the coords also for the cache. A little history on Swatara State Park in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania allows visitors a glimpse back in time. The park covers 3330 acres in Lebanon and Schuykill counties in south-central Pennsylvania. The most striking feature of the park is the Swatara Creek Water Gap - where the creek cuts through the hard stone of Blue Mountain. At its narrowest, the gap is only 800 feet across and it is about a mile across at its widest. Fossil Pits in Swatara State Park contain both Tuscarora Quartzite, which is 425 million years old from the Silurian Age, and Martinsburg Formation, which is 500 million years or Ordovician, which produced 235 feet of fossiliferous beds exposed in an open pit. The Suedberg fossil pit contains fossils some 375 million years old. The fossils here are more abundant than at the water gap site. Various species of brachiopods, corals and sea lilies can be found here. It really was fun doing the cache and actually finding some fossils.
Our next few caches were simple traditional caches one found on a guardrail in Ravine, PA, 2 in Pine Grove, PA located on different pieces of old war artillery, our next cache was on a guardrail at a old covered bridge outside Pine Grove for which I was unable to find out anything about it, and our next cache was near a exit off Rt 81 in the woods.
We had to drive through Fort Indiantown Gap to find our next cache which is an active military reservation so you could not leave any of the roads for any reason and if they caught you supposedly they would arrest you. The cache was a virtual called The Blue Eyed Six for which we had to drive to a location and get some information off a sign and send it by email to the cache owner. There is quite a history on the Blue Eyed Six who were a group of six men, all of them were coincidentally blue-eyed, who were arrested and indicted on first degree murder charges in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, in 1879. The Six were Charles Drews, Frank Stichler, Henry F. Wise, Josiah Hummel, Israel Brandt and George Zechman. This group of friends and unsavory business associates conspired to murder their neighbor, Joseph Raber, for an insurance pay-off. Raber, age 65, lived in poverty with his housekeeper in a charcoal burner's hut in the Blue Mountain area of northern Lebanon County. Raber had no steady employment and depended mainly on the charity of his equally impoverished neighbors. In early July 1878, four of the conspirators met at Brandt's hotel at St. Joseph Spring and agreed to insure Raber for a total of $8,000. The men told the insurance agent that they had agreed to take care of Raber for the rest of his life and wanted the policy to cover his eventual burial expenses. Several assessment-type life insurance policies were sold on Joseph Raber, with his cooperation, with the men named as the beneficiaries. Later that year they enlisted two other men to drown Raber in Indiantown Creek. Without any evidence to the contrary, the coroner ruled the death accidental. Although the local citizenry suspected foul play, it wasn't until two months later, when Drews's son-in-law reported to the constable that he was an eye-witness to the murder, that the six men were arrested and held over for trial.Due, perhaps, to the fanciful nickname that the conspirators were given by the newspapers, the trial gained more than its share of attention. Reporters from throughout the east coast descended on Lebanon, and the story was carried worldwide. The trial began on 18 April. The Commonwealth's main witness was Drews's son-in-law, but he was only one of thirty-six witnesses called by the prosecution. The defense called twenty-two witnesses. The witnesses on both sides were mainly friends, neighbors, and family members who contradicted each other at every turn. It became evident that there were many people who knew of, or suspected, the plot before and after Raber's death, but who did not come forward for fear of mortal retaliation. At 3:30 p.m. on 24 April 1879, the fate of the Blue Eyed Six was left in the hands of the twelve men of the jury. The wait was not long. Five hours later the courthouse bell rang out, announcing that they had reached their verdicts. The jury returned verdicts of guilty of first degree murder for all six of the defendants. Defense requested that the jury be polled, and so the word "Guilty" was uttered seventy-two times, once for each defendant from each juror. The local newspaper noted that it was the first time in the recorded history of common law of the United States and England that six people were convicted of murder on a single indictment. On appeal, the judge awarded Zechman a new trial, based on the lack of direct evidence presented by the Commonwealth against him personally. He was acquitted in his second trial on essentially the same evidence. The other five defendants were sentenced to death by hanging. Drews and Stichler, who had done the deed, were hanged first. After all other appeals were exhausted, Wise, Hummel, and Brandt were hanged the next year. Zechman died of natural causes within the decade. Apart from the actual murder trial, the whole proceeding turned out to be an indictment of the murky business of assessment life insurance, which led to major changes in insurance law, particularly with regard to the practice of insuring people in whom one had no legal interest. The Blue Eyed Six are commonly thought to be buried in the cemetery at Moonshine's Church (actual name of its founder Henry Moonshine, who donated the land for the church and cemetery), Grantville, PA, near the site of the murder. Although Joseph Raber, the victim, is buried there, the six conspirators were all buried separately by their families elsewhere in the county. Nevertheless, local folklore persists that they haunt the churchyard of the church on Moonshine Rd. The legend tells that someone in the church one night felt watched. He turned to see 3 sets of blue eyes staring through the blanket of darkness behind the window into the room. The stares followed him everywhere; he could not escape them. He freaked. Since then, many, many people have told the story of seeing the 3 sets of blue eyes, or The Blue-Eyed Six looking at them through the window, or in the graveyard, or anywhere else around the church late at night. Many people have gone up there at night just to see..
Our next cache coincidently was at the cemetery of the Moonshine Church and it was a multi-cache. We had to go the cemetery to find the grave site of Sabrina Drews, wife of one of the Blue Eyed Six as we needed to get some information off the stone to figure out the coords for the second part and we did see the grave of Joesph Raber. We figured out the final coords and we drove back out of Fort Indiantown Gap property to a site near the Applachain Trail where there were ruins of an old stone house where we found the cache hidden in the crumpled back wall under some of the stones used to build the house. We knew when we were looking for the grave site in the Moonshine Cemetery something felt kind of spooky and eerie as legend has it that if you wander into the woods behind the church at midnight, you'll not be able to find your way back and if you do you'll more than likely be welcomed by a pentagram on the back door. More stories of seeing ghosts and soldiers walking around in the church if you peer through the windows at night are told. If a car is speeding past, it's said that it will stall. Visitors are warned not to turn their car off because it will not restart.
We had to drive back through Pine Grove and we noticed an old movie theater and we took some pictures and found some history on it. The Hippodrome Theater was constructed in 1910 by Gregory Achenbach, father of Harvena Achenbach Richter, wife of noted author Conrad Richter, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. Vaudeville and other live productions were held on the stage in addition to movies being shown. In 1935 the theater was refurbished (probably to add sound) and the name was shortened to Hipp. It closed in the mid 1950's. In October 1962, after a complete reconstruction (removal of the orchestra pit, balcony, and many exit doors) it reopened as the Pine Theaterwith "The Music Man". The theatre operated for seven days a week for a few years until going to weekends only. The upstairs was known as the Pine Terrace which hosted class reunions, wedding receptions, and banquests. Pine Terrace closed in the late 1970's and the theater began to deteriorate. It closed in 1999. The Millers bought the theater and completed refurbished it, removing some seats for handicapped access. Opening as Pine Grove Theatre in April 2001 with "Cast Away", it began to host Pinegrove Historical Society programs, concerts, plays, and other live entertainment. Boy some of these small towns really have some great history.
Next cache was in a small park back in the woods overlooking a lovely small lake with only one private home on the lake and our last cache was at Lickdale Campgrounds near where we are staying which was a multi-cache. We found both stages quickly and then we were off back to the campgrounds. I took a shower and Mom did our cache logs. I am still attempting to put pictures on our blog without much luck so far. Well it's time to feed the dogs and then we are going to eat so we will say until tomorrow when we will be at Scott's house in Binghamton. We love you all and can't wait to see you guys.


Picture List:1-Dori freezing her tushy off with our fossils, 2&3-Two of the fossils we found in Swatara State Park, 4,5,6,7-Covered Bridge in PA, 8,9,10,11-Ruins where the final stage of the Blue Eyed Six cache was located, 12-St Joesph's Spring Circa 1937, 13,14,15,16,17,18-Revolutionary Soldiers and early settlers of Pine Grove, PA Cemetery, 19-Moonshine United Zion Church, 20-Joesph Raber the man killed by the Blue Eyed Six, 21-Suedberg Church of God, 22-Hippidrome Theater Circa 1910, 23-Old coal loading docks, 24-Old house along the road, 25-Private home on a small lake.