Dodging Raindrops

 Sitting at home and waiting for body parts to heal is never fun. In fact it can be down-right boring.  Ann Marie and I are both favoring different parts of our bodies right now, trying our best not to antagonize anything and make it worse.

    We decided to break things up a bit and take a small road trip. We’d do a couple geocaches, stop for a cup of coffee at a favorite coffee shop and then head home. We wouldn’t go far and we’d limit our activities. Tuesday looked like the day for it, our schedules were both clear.

    On the road, we passed the new location of our favorite farm store. Pulling in we found out that it was their second day open. (Their official opening will be on Wednesday) Harvest Valley Farms is where we go for fresh veggies and fruits. They also carry meats from local butchers and best of all, their fresh baked pies and baked goods are delicious! Their new location has a large area for plants, along with a greenhouse. They had herbs, flowers and tomatoes to name just a few. The humid smell of the plants growing in the greenhouse started us thinking about our own gardens, bringing back the urge to dig our hands into the soil.

    We did some geocaches located on some back roads we hadn’t been on before. One of the caches we found was my 2500^th find! The best cache we did was inside a small local “free” library. The cache itself was a hollowed out book. How cool! A couple of them were beside a small stream, running fast with dirty brown water from the recent rains. We were dodging rain during the whole trip, dark clouds and rain one minute and then sunshine and brilliant colors the next.

    We stopped for coffee and spent some time watching the customers come and go. It was a never-ending parade of people. There were different styles of dress, different types of drinks and snacks and also, different speeds. Some were in and out in a minute or two while others, in a more leisurely mood, stopped to talk with friends. Some came in to work. Laptops and paperwork were set up on their tables. The smell of fresh coffee hung heavy in the air mixing nicely with an undercurrent of conversation. It is a very comfortable place, and we never tire of it. The time always passes quickly.

    We did a one more cache after we left. Having not planned on doing it, I never wrote down the co-ordinates or entered them in the GPS. I knew where it was located and since we were only a “few” miles away, we went over to see if we could find it. From reading the cache description, I knew it was hanging on a gate. The problem was finding the gate; it was lying in the woods, not far from the gateposts. After 3 or 4 minutes, we had found it! I always get a kick out of finding a cache without using the GPS. Some caches are extremely obvious hides and are easy to find while others require a bit of searching. This was one of the latter.

    We also made a quick stop at the Winfield Furnace involving another “short” detour but well worth it. The rain we had been driving in and out of had started up again. The furnace and the pathway leading to it were surrounded with flowering trees and their scent was overpowering. If only it could be bottled! It was heady and made me forget about the rain. I didn’t care that my camera and shoes were getting wet. The combination of rain and flowers carried me away. These smells are the things that dreams are made of, the smells I look forward to each year, the smells of springtime.

    It was only 5 miles away home when we ran into our first road block. We had passed hundreds of uprooted trees, remnants of last Tuesdays storms. Huge trunks lay on their sides and wide lateral roots stood high on edge, chain sawed ends faced roadways and driveways, unruly piles of limbs sat adjacent to the pavement, all of them cleared from the roads to allow passage. We were almost most home when we finally got caught, a ¼ mile from the last turn and we came across a wooden horse with a “road closed” sign on it. Tire tracks in the edges of the yards showed that we weren’t the first to have to turn around. A detour of about a mile and we were back on our route.

    We were both glad to be home. We both handled the drive with only minimal discomfort. The wonderful smells of the flowers, shrubs and trees made the ride enjoyable and the colors of the new foliage, dampened by the rain and lit by the sun peeking through dark clouds gave each turn in the road another view of Mother Nature’s handiwork! It turned out to be a great day for a ride, our boredom was quickly forgotten.