Soup Is Not A Finger Food

Hide and Seek

LAST WEEKEND, I dragged took my neighbor Stephanie up to my old stompin' grounds. My aunt and uncle built a sweet cabin on the ridge above what used to be my grandmother's (her mother's) farm, and they kindly allowed us to invade for a girls' weekend. Steph's sister Dory and Dory's friend Diane met us there. Our mission: A whole bunch of geocaching, a ride on the Millersburg Ferry and a visit to the Ned Smith Nature and Art festival.

I provided nonstop running commentary and shared interesting facts spouted minutiae about my hometown. I pointed out where my relatives live. (Which was, like, every third house.) I told stories from back in the day.  I wouldn't shut up was probably pretty unbearable, but I was their chauffer, so they were my captive audience.

For the uninitiated, geocaching is a worldwide game of hide and seek. You can find lists of "caches" on the website, enter the coordinates into your handheld GPS, then use that to guide you to the exact location of the cache. Along the way you can get sunburned hike, learn local history, and you get to see things that are miles from all civilization off the beaten path. My companions are all quite experienced geocachers, but they were patient and willing to train their chauffer.

But enough of my prattling on and on and on. I'll let the photos do (most of) the talking.

Dory fishes a microcache out of its hiding place while Steph logs our find.

One of the caches we found was hidden in state gamelands, high above the Susquehanna River... 

 
...and Routes 11/15. This was just north of Liverpool, PA. 
 
We found caches at two covered bridges - 
 
 
...the Aline Bridge, just up Route 104 on the way to Middleburg, and...

 
...Red Bridge, outside of Liverpool. Please don't tell anyone that I grew up maybe 4 miles from this bridge but never knew it was there.  Adjacent to this site were an old outhouse--

 
---and a long-abandoned house:

 

There were also cemeteries (which, I just learned, is from the Greek word that means "sleeping place"). There was the one out by Barners Church -

 
...where there are, in fact, many tombstones bearing the name "Barner."

 
(...even though this photo features a "Meiser" grave marker. You'll have to take my word for it.) 

Then there was the cemetery at the site of the former St. Michael's Evangelical Lutheran Church in Pfoutz Valley. It's an equally peaceful "sleeping place":

 

 This cemetery used to be adjacent to a church, which has long since been razed:

 
St. Michael's is next to the farm that was my aunt & uncle's, and the next farm after that one was was my grandmother's - where my dad grew up. So you see, I can't even count how many times I've driven by this place. And yet, I can remember only stopping and visiting it a few times. It's so peaceful and quiet there, and as I surveyed the plot's location amid corn and soybean fields, I got to thinking how this would be such a nice place to spend my eternal rest, because the chances are next to zero that they would pave over this particular slice of paradise... but then I remembered the other cemetery we visited earlier in the day -

 
The cache was nestled next to Sarah Catharine Shuman's grave. She died when she was only ten. And that was next to these --

 
--which were sequestered way up on top of a slab of earth that was flanked by a highway on-ramp and an off-ramp - the Millerstown exit of Routes 22/322. The highway was built in the '60s, and my cousin Julie tells me that her dad protested the original plan to relocate those graves. The highway was redesigned to leave this small family plot intact. And I am sure that when Catharine's grieving parents buried their precious daughter there, they couldn't have imagined that her resting place would end up overgrown and inaccessible to all but the hardiest, most adventurous hikers. I mean, you really have to wanna get up there.

Now, this cache -

 
...was called Nekoda. The cache was hidden in an overgrown area across the road from an old structure that once housed a general store and a post office. Until recently, it still showed up on maps of Pennsylvania, even though the post office has been defunct for decades. The building sat abandoned for many years. I could see it from my bedroom window. I spent 16 years looking across the corn fields at it, wondering if it really was haunted, as was the rumor.  A family has since bought it and fixed it up and I'd love to see what it looks like inside - I bet it's great fun to ramble around in there. We, however, were focused on navigating 'round needle-sharp bramble bushes to locate the cache that was tucked into the overgrowth near an old stone wall that may have once been the foundation for a barn or other outbuilding.

 
My fellow seekers - Steph, Dory and Diane. And yes, that's a Busch Pounder in Dory's hand. This was our 15th and final cache of the day, and we decided to linger 'neath the evergreens and enjoy a refreshing cold beverage to celebrate our finds. What a fun day - I enjoyed showing my friends around my hometown and surrounding area, and really liked learning some new things, too.

I have more to share, including the Millersburg Ferry photos - but those will have to wait for another day. Until next time -

It's Field Day Again!

PEEZER WORE HIS EXTRA-FAST SNEAKERS to school today, because it's Field Day. Well, actually, it's more like Field Two Hours, because it isn't a day, it's a couple of hours in the afternoon. But the kid is super-excited for a day of fun and frolic and feats of derring-do.

Back when I was a kid, Field Day was the WHOLE. ENTIRE. DAY. And I hated it. Haaaaaated. I was not athletically gifted. I found no joy in being outside in the searing June sun with a swarm of gnats methodically invading each of my facial orifices (orifi?).

 
That's not me; it came from Thisfails.com. But that's sure how it FELT.

Pay a visit to my older blog and read about my tragic run-in with some hurdles on one fateful field day. Suffice it to say, mortification ensued. But, as Soup Husband Curt always says, Comedy = Tragedy + Time, and now that we're three-plus decades removed from that scarring day, I can giggle about it. A little.

Snow Way

WHILE SOME SNOW STILL REMAINS on the ground from last week, it's pretty much all melted away. It's plenty cold enough for snow here today - it was 18 degrees (F) this morning in my carport - but snow is not in our forecast. I believe that is because the Weather Gods shot their wad last year during Snowpocalypse / Snowmageddon / [insert hyperbolic nickname here] and have nothing left to give us here in the Mid-Atlantic.

Do you remember? Do you want to? Of course you do. It's hip and trendy to recycle, and so I will do that here, first with a photo -

 
...and then with links to my posts with video clips about the blizzard's first weekend and my kid making snow smoothies (cute!) and the day before the third big snowfall of the week (it was getting old by then) and day four of being snowbound.

Just watching those videos and reading what I wrote, I can tell I'm not completely over the trauma of all that snow in such a short amount of time. Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it.

Pitching pfennigs

IN A RECENT SEARCH FOR BLOG INSPIRATION, I was flipping through old photo albums. I came upon the scrapbook I put together of our honeymoon trip to Europe. The photographs and mementos brought back some great memories of a once-in-a-lifetime trip. However, the details have kind of... faded. After all, we got married a hundred years ago  in a land before cell phones in 1993, and the frankly, my memory just isn’t what it used to be.

Lucky, then, that I kept a travel journal of the trip, and made Curt write in it, too! (Kids: Listen to your mom when she makes you do this. My mom made us girls keep one when we took a big trip through the south, and even though I thought it was stupid then (sorry, mom), I realize now how wise it really was.) If only I knew where that one was.

Anyway. It was a grand whirlwind of a trip, including stops in Germany, Paris and England, cobbled together on the cheap, which is something at which we excel. And so it was that on Monday morning, October 4, 1993, we arrived in Frankfurt, Germany, bleary-eyed but eagery to party experience all Europe had to offer. Our good friends Jim and Beth, who had been transferred there due to Beth’s job with the Department of State, were our hosts and tourguides.

We were in Germany, after all, so naturally, we drank lots of beer, ate lots of comfort food and toured plenty of old castles. But the best anecdote from the trip happened when the four of us got a little, um, sidetracked and ended up in the middle of nowhere. Here’s how we recounted the story in our travel journal, the day after the adventure:

MEG WRITING: Finally got around after a good breakfast of cornmeal pancakes and going to the travel agent at the consultate (Beth and me, to book the train to Paris) and the bank (Curt and Jim, to get money). We ate pastries in each train station (Frankfurt and Wiesbaden) – all the pastries are top-rate around here – who’d think you could get yummy pastries in a train station?!

...and not only pastries, but also, beer. You can drink a beer in the train station! You don't have to speak German to figure out what a Trinkhalle is. 
 
Anyway, we hopped on the S-bahn train in Frankfurt to Wiesbaden and transferred to go out the Rhine Valley. Rode out to a cute little town called Lorch – all was closed for the season! [My memory says this town was quite small. More about Lorch on Wikipedia.] So we got back on the train (after causing a commotion in the train station by pitching 10 pfennig coins against the wall) to Rudesheim.

Pitching pfennigs in a German train station. See Wikipedia for more on "pitching pennies."

Here, we hit paydirt – tasted wines in three different places. It was always served in a thick, sometimes colored-stemmed glass. This was fun, especially at the third place, where Beth & Jim revealed that they got married last year before they came here!...

We tasted lots of wine in this charming, quaint village. 

We went for dinner – I had a meatloaf-like hunk o’meat with gravy and fries and Curt ate Sauerbraten. Also more wine. We were working our way back to the train station – stopped in a wine shop and to have coffee and hot chocolate; got really involved in pfennig-pitching again and followed a bunch of Germans right onto….THE WRONG TRAIN! Took us a whole stop to realize the Rhine was on the same side [of the train] as when we went out.

All of a sudden, we were BACK IN LORCH, which was still closed and not [looking] nearly as quaint as it had earlier…

CURT WRITING: …We had just about no money, no trains back to Frankfurt, no way to call a cab and no hotels within 10K of good ole Lorch. As if we’ll ever forget it – I’ll recall this night on Route 42 in backwoods Germany.

We walked along through Lorch and finally came out to the main highway. Our choices were:

1. Hitchhike

2. Place a call at the SOS box

 
I found this shot of Lorch on Wikipedia. You can see the train tracks and even the station in the bottom/left corner, running next to the highway, which is next to the river and the wee little village.

We decided, in desperation, to thumb it. It took us FIVE SECONDS TO GET A RIDE! The first car by stopped. It was some excellent long-haired dude in a tiny little Citroen. He drove us to the next town, where there were still no trains. So this guy drove us all the way to Wiesbaden where the “S” commuter trains from Frankfurt extend.

“Seth” – our Aryan hero [as we’d dubbed him – he never offered his name] – wouldn’t take any money, and just sped off into the night. [As I recall we left what little cash we had left on his backseat as a token of our gratitude.] The trip back to JimBeth’s was uneventful from Weisbaden on in. We arrived home at 1:05 a.m. with all our money, [something] which seemed totally impossible when we stood in the rain in Lorch. Moral: There is no stinking moral. This is just what can happen when you wing it.

MEG TODAY: So picture it. We were a bunch of semi-drunk twenty-somethings celebrating love and our friendship as we chugged guzzled sipped our way through the beautiful Rhine river valley on a glorious autumn day. Still giddy from the day’s fun, and a little tired, too, we piled on the train, happy to be heading back home. It wasn’t until the train had started moving that I remember Beth looking out the window and calmly saying, “Hey – wasn’t the river on our left on the way out here?” Then, three beats of silence while our brains processed this observation, after which we realized our grave mistake. We hopped off the train, it left, and… realized we'd just gotten off the last train for the night and were stuck in a tiny German town in the middle of nowhere.

As if on cue, it began to rain! I remember feeling a little wary of the hitchhiking plan, but it was like 11pm and we really had no alternative. But no sooner did we stick our thumbs out than this car shows up, and the dude driving was super-nice. We all piled into this tiny vehicle, a la clown car, totally at this guy’s mercy. Turns out, he’d spent some time in Texas, spoke great English, and was listening to some English music (was it Eric Clapton or Bruce Springsteen? I don’t recall).

I think it was Jim who dubbed him “Seth, our Aryan Angel.” Three years later, we named our first baby Seth, not after our angel, but because it was a family name on Curt’s side. It was only recently that I remembered about Seth the Aryan Angel and thought what a nice coincidence that was.

And THAT, friends, is how I ended up hitchhiking in Germany on my honeymoon!

Food and memories

THE LINK BETWEEN FOOD AND MEMORIES is undeniable. It's strong. It's pervasive. Take a mouthful of mashed potatoes and gravy and you might be transported back to your Sunday dinner table when you were a kid.  Every time I re-create a recipe that my mom or my grandmas made, I'm strengthening that connection.

It was on this premise that I based my other blog, My Grandmas' Recipes. At first, it was just going to be a cookbook, but then I decided to put the recipes on-line. Lately, though, it's been as much about the memories as it has been an instructional guide for making things I remember from my childhood.

In response to my recent update of my post about my Grandma Sara's butter brickle, my mom emailed me to say how much she enjoyed re-reading it and remembering both her mother-in-law and the delicious things she made. I replied that there's just something about food that evokes strong memories.

Mom replied, in part:

"Last summer I made (for different meals) fried tomatoes, and then warm cabbage slaw. I really thought of Grandma Losch [her own mother] then. Hmm, will/does anything food-wise make you think of me?"

Well, yes, Mom - of course I have food memories I tie to you! And rather than send you an off-line email, I thought it would be more fun to collect some of my memories over on My Grandmas' Recipes. 

Readers, hop over there to read some of the ones that were at the front of my mind... and leave your own food-related memories there, too. I know you all have 'em...