Fourth of July, Family, and Friends
The beginning of July marks a lot of important things in my life. July 1 and July 4 each memorialize the founding of the two countries I proudly call my home (Canada and the United States, respectively). July 3 is my wedding anniversary. July 6 is my mother’s birthday. The latter is difficult to celebrate due to 2700 intervening miles, but it is still worth noting. Because of the first two items mentioned, it also guarantees at least one long weekend. So on July 4th, we hit the road. We decided to be spontaneous and follow our geocaching Most Wanted list. We identified the nearest cache to us and made that our starting point.
The first stop of the day would be Caterpillar Tracks near Stoystown, PA. This is a tank cache. Tank caches can be some of the trickiest to find because there are seemingly infinite places to hide a geocache. Furthermore, lots of people who place tank caches love placing nanos or micros. Unfortunately, there’s no sure-fire way to make finding a tank cache easy, but reading the description, hint, and past logs carefully can help. In the case of this specific tank cache, the key was to note the size of the container. Once I realized that it was a regular sized cache, I could rule out a lot of places (yay, wouldn’t have to stick my hand some place too gross!). But the lawn of an American Legion is a very appropriate place to be on July 4th and we took in all of the military equipment they had outside for the public to look at. But, for what it’s worth, the most challenging tank cache I have ever encountered is on the grounds of the Pennsylvania Military Museum in Boalsburg, PA: Tanks Again.
Hey, look out behind you!
From Stoystown, I really was unsure if following from nearest cache to nearest cache on the list would shoot me toward Breezewood, PA or back west. To our surprise, it pointed us toward Ford City, north of Pittsburgh on the Allegheny River. This cache, generically titled Not another one-n-a-half, one-n-a-half, was not only a unique cache, but had a difficulty and terrain combination we had not yet found (difficulty of 4.5 out of 5 and terrain of 1 out of 5). A common challenge in the geocaching community is to find all 81 difficulty and terrain combinations. I’m not aggressively working on it, but I would eventually like to get there. Though the odds are pretty good it’ll take years to clear out all of the terrain level 5 difficulty combinations. That’s not how I like to play, though others love doing those ones almost exclusively.
Getting a better sense of the trajectory we would take, I called up my best friend from college, Jenn. To let her know we were on our way to Harmony and Zelienople, which wasn’t really all that far from her parent’s home in Beaver County, PA. She invited us to her parent’s house to celebrate the 4th, just to let them know when we had a more solid idea of when we would arrive.
From Ford City, we drove the scenic back roads to Harmony. Harmony is where the Harmony Society, a religious order that escaped persecution from the Lutherans in Germany first established themselves in the United States. One of the remaining historical sites related to their lives in Harmony, which is now little more than a quiet exit off of I-79, is the cemetery. Their cemetery is unique. There are no headstones. The cemetery is just a rectangle of land with a perimeter marked by a thick stone wall. Entry to the cemetery is through a heavy stone door beneath an arch. When we arrived we thought about entering, but standing at the entrance and peering through the entrance, we felt like we ought to let the spirits rest. Like the name of the geocache that brought us here, don’t wake the dead.
Gateway into the Harmony Society cemetery
We love the small towns in Pennsylvania. Even the hardworking, unremarkable places that have little more to say for them that they’re “a great place to grow up” seem well-maintained and pleasant to pass through. I often wonder why similar towns in West Virginia can’t seem so nice. Leaving Zelienople we had to wait for a train to cross the road. If you closed your eyes, you could imagine how the town must have been a century earlier. On the road out of town we slowly edged past the train that was taking a more direct route than the road that wound around and above the tracks. The drive to Beaver Falls and past to Jenn’s parent’s home was nothing short of relaxing, before we knew it we were pulling in the driveway.
Jenn is one of those friends who is amazing to see every day (we lived together in college), yet if we don’t see each other for months it is like no time has passed the next time we do see each other. Chris and I also love her parents and siblings. We couldn’t imagine a more pleasant end to our 4th of July than with such a wonderful family.