So aside from the poison ivy rashes (which reared its ugly head once I came home), I had a nice time in Pennsylvania for a few days.

I stayed at the Fulton Steamboat Inn, probably THE place to stay at if you’re ever visiting this area (and I don’t merely say that because of the sweet hotel girl I met here.) As soon as you come near you can hear folksy music playing in the background, and the hotel is especially a treat to the eyes at night:

Look at all the purdy lights!

Awesome rooms too:

LOVE

After catching a bluegrass show the first night, it was off to go geocaching for the remainder of my trip there. One of the things that I should have realized about this pastime is that when you go outdoors, you expose yourself to unpleasant, outdoorsy things. Like say, poison ivy.

And course, only me, would catch a BAD case of poison ivy by looking around for a geocache at a Walmart parking lot. Yes, seriously. A week later the rashes have left me weeping in a corner for several days now, while wishing death and destruction on the idiot douche monkey cache owner for hiding this thing in a jungle of this VILE, EVIL WEED. Seriously, who expects to run into poison ivy at WALMART? Oy.

I did fare better on future cache hunts though, the most rewarding of which was hidden at a covered bridge here:

Wow... it really covers!

You would thinking finding a cache here would be easy right? Well, aside from almost getting mowed down by passing cars who liked to drive 300 miles an hour over the bridge, when I realized where I had to look…

Errmm...

Are you kidding me?

Oh boy. There was a tiny ledge underneath the bridge, but the only way to get to it was to swing under by holding one of the wooden beams. I’m telling you, I came THISCLOSE to falling into the water. I was sure the wood was going to give way and I would wind up spending the night at a hospital with splinters and pneumonia. Somehow though I pulled it off, grabbed the cache while holding on to one of the beams, and swung out. Behold:

Who does your Daddy work for now, punk?

Inside were several items known as swag (trade items geocachers leave behind) and a geocoin that came from British Columbia, which I took as my reward. Due to their nature though I can’t hold on to it, so I’ll need to drop the coin off at another cache soon, where it will continue its worldwide journey.

After that near brush with death and swimming with the fishes, I decided to avoid the more riskier caches and opt for those that took me to various areas around Lancaster, preferably those places that didn’t require bushwhacking my way through the forests where evil, dangerous things like groundhogs lurked. Filtering those out, I ended up finding one near a game farm:

What are YOU lookin' at?

And one near an Amish store, where I bought a homemade sausage pretzel from a pretty Amish babe. Mmmmmm, mmmmmm, MMMM! She can do Rumspringa with me anytime.

But anyhoo, *ahem*, I have to say, geocaching is definitely providing some helpful fodder for my blogging, primarily because it leads me to places I normally wouldn’t go on my own. Usually I’m just driving around aimlessly when I’m unsure of what to do, (which is pretty much the case for me 90 percent of the time,) so it’s nice to finally come across a hobby that can provide some much needed focus to my otherwise meandering and boring life.

I have more pictures from the trip by the way, so if you’d like to see them you can check them out at my gallery or on Flickr. Enjoy!

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Tags: Amish, blogging, bluegrass, country, covered bridge, geocache, geocaching, hobby, hotel, Pennsylvania, photo, Photos, poison ivy, walmart
Categories: Lincoln's Personal Log
 
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