It Is With Some Sadness I Announce

[+flask]

it is snowing at my house.

 

a lot.

 

my car is all packed and tomorrow morning i will leave the house to go geocaching for the next week. i intend to live in my car the whole time, coming indoors only to visit libraries, gas stations, a church and a concert hall.

 

i expect it to be cold.

 

good.

[+wimseyguy]

I like snow. I just don't like it a lot. I moved further south where it doesn't snow quite so often, but I can easily fly somewhere for a few days to play in it.

[+Moose Mob]

I like snow also. I can stand in the window wioth a cup of cocoa and stare out at it all day.

[+Ambrosia]

Have a very good trip, flask.

[+nfa]

Hi Flask,

 

Are you coming this way? Will you be staying at your regular ADK digs? If you're coming this way, drop me a line, and we can get out and find a couple together.

 

jamie

[+sept1c_tank]

Get your shorts and sandals on and have a jolly good time!

[+flask]

ambrosia-

 

yes, i intend to. hold onto your socks; i'm going to send you a couple mp3s.

 

NFA-

 

i don't know, particularly. is lake clear on the way from brattleboro to ithaca? it might be, if i try hard enough.

[+Team Silver]

i am a displaced Marylander by the military and i pine for snow here in South Carolina...i get jealous hearing how other parts of the country may be under havey snow cover...God bless all of you who witness real snow...i have not for 2.5 years and counting.

[+briansnat]

it is snowing at my house.

 

a lot.

 

my car is all packed and tomorrow morning i will leave the house to go geocaching for the next week. i intend to live in my car the whole time, coming indoors only to visit libraries, gas stations, a church and a concert hall.

 

i expect it to be cold.

 

good.

Come to northern NJ. You will be pleasantly surprised. I promise. Its only a tank of gas away (unless you have Hummer).

Edited November 23, 2005 by briansnat

[+flask]

brian, aside from the fact that all my pqs for the next seven days are already processed, what is it about north jersey that would surprise me, pleasant or otherwise?

 

is the snow better than here?

 

my sadness is not about the weather; it's kind of an existential thing about the precession of the seasons.

 

i was in north jersey this past spring. it was very lovely. not surprising, but very lovely.

 

i am familiar with autumn and winter in north jersey.

 

i speak as one who knows well the sound of the steel deck bridge at the little ferry traffic circle, who knows the look of the landing lights at teeterboro airport, who knows the smell outside by the mercedes-benz sign in fort lee, looking out to long lines of bridge lights.

 

i've eaten at the fireplace in paramus. i've begged for money to buy an italian ice at strehl's, on the edge of radburn. i listened for the singing of the steel deck warm and asleep in my father's car, looked out at those lights from my grandfather's attic, from my grandmother's lap. i instinctively know where every one of those blue firebox lights is in guttenberg, or where they used to be, and i can sing out each place as i pass in the dark.

 

in short, i am from new jersey. nobody believes me when i tell them, but it's true.

[+Ambrosia]

ambrosia-

 

yes, i intend to. hold onto your socks; i'm going to send you a couple mp3s.

 

NFA-

 

i don't know, particularly. is lake clear on the way from brattleboro to ithaca? it might be, if i try hard enough.

Beautiful!

[CoyoteRed]

i am a displaced Marylander by the military and i pine for snow here in South Carolina...i get jealous hearing how other parts of the country may be under havey snow cover...God bless all of you who witness real snow...i have not for 2.5 years and counting.

Hey, we get snow! At least a half an inch every few years!

 

Yup, I remember back to the blizzard of '89. It was Christmas eve. I was driving truck at the time and it had been sprinkling most of the day. Not too cold, but enough to wear a heavier jacket. I was unloading at the local paper mill and the sun was going down. "Hmmm... temperature dropping awful quick," I thought to myself. I needed my gloves and as I walked to the cab my footing got all weird on me.

 

"Ice?" I thought to myself? Yup.

 

Well, it was an adventure getting home with all of the black ice that night. But let me tell ya, Christmas morning was a white one. We had snow drifts a good 3 or 4 inches deep!

 

Yup, we get snow.

Edited November 23, 2005 by CoyoteRed

[+Isonzo Karst]

How well I remember the Great Snow of '79 here in Central Florida (or was it '80? anyway, we've had a couple inches sometime in the last 25 years or so). But I'm with you on the procession of the seasons

[+briansnat]

brian, aside from the fact that all my pqs for the next seven days are already processed, what is it about north jersey that would surprise me, pleasant or otherwise?

 

is the snow better than here?

 

my sadness is not about the weather; it's kind of an existential thing about the precession of the seasons.

 

i was in north jersey this past spring. it was very lovely. not surprising, but very lovely.

 

i am familiar with autumn and winter in north jersey.

 

i speak as one who knows well the sound of the steel deck bridge at the little ferry traffic circle, who knows the look of the landing lights at teeterboro airport, who knows the smell outside by the mercedes-benz sign in fort lee, looking out to long lines of bridge lights.

 

i've eaten at the fireplace in paramus. i've begged for money to buy an italian ice at strehl's, on the edge of radburn. i listened for the singing of the steel deck warm and asleep in my father's car, looked out at those lights from my grandfather's attic, from my grandmother's lap. i instinctively know where every one of those blue firebox lights is in guttenberg, or where they used to be, and i can sing out each place as i pass in the dark.

 

in short, i am from new jersey. nobody believes me when i tell them, but it's true.

Well since you're from NJ you might not be all that surprised by certain things. No the snow is not better than Vt here. Far from it, but I think you would be surprised by the general, high quality of the caches here. Not many Walmart and dog poop park micros in northern NJ.

 

As far as what can be surprising about NJ, many people have this perception of the state:

 

 

And are very surprised to find out that a good part of it looks like this:

 

 

this:

 

and this:

Edited November 23, 2005 by briansnat

[+The Leprechauns]

brian, aside from the fact that all my pqs for the next seven days are already processed, what is it about north jersey that would surprise me, pleasant or otherwise?

 

is the snow better than here?

 

my sadness is not about the weather; it's kind of an existential thing about the precession of the seasons.

 

i was in north jersey this past spring. it was very lovely. not surprising, but very lovely.

 

i am familiar with autumn and winter in north jersey.

 

i speak as one who knows well the sound of the steel deck bridge at the little ferry traffic circle, who knows the look of the landing lights at teeterboro airport, who knows the smell outside by the mercedes-benz sign in fort lee, looking out to long lines of bridge lights.

 

i've eaten at the fireplace in paramus. i've begged for money to buy an italian ice at strehl's, on the edge of radburn. i listened for the singing of the steel deck warm and asleep in my father's car, looked out at those lights from my grandfather's attic, from my grandmother's lap. i instinctively know where every one of those blue firebox lights is in guttenberg, or where they used to be, and i can sing out each place as i pass in the dark.

 

in short, i am from new jersey. nobody believes me when i tell them, but it's true.

The State of New Jersey ought to be paying you to write that. Good stuff.

 

When you get back, I'd be grateful if you could paint a similar word picture of Ithaca. My family comes from a lake or two over, on Owasco Lake. It is important land to me.

[+Moose Mob]

I think we are about due for a chorus of "Caching through the Snow"

[+Planet]

From this thread which I resurrect every year!

 

"Caching in the snow

 

Caching in the snow

And hoping to find our way

To the treasure trove

Bushwhaking all the way...

Whak! Whak! Whak!

 

We can't feel our toes

And we've lost our flashlight

But what fun it is to slip and slide

By GPS glow at night!

 

Ohhhhhh...

Jingle Bells, Caching Tales

"It'll be fun", they said

Found the spot, and now we're lost

Our batteries went dead.

 

Hey!

 

(Loosely based on a recent caching adventure)

 

George"

[+Clothahump]

Aaarrgghhh.....snow

 

Anything under 70 degrees Fahrenheit isn't fit for humans to live in.

[+NorthWes]

Anything under 70 degrees Fahrenheit isn't fit for humans to live in.

 

Geez - and we're whining because it *only* snowed a half-foot here today in Anchorage...

 

MUST.... HAVE.... MORE... SNOW.... SCOTTIE!

 

Gotta have at least a good two feet down on the ground before we can skate around the woods on skis, and I like at least four feet down to go snowmobiling... makes accessing those back-country caches so much easier! The Ladybug Kids up in Fairbanks even go skijoring (racing around the countryside on skis, pulled by a couple of eager to run dogs).

 

Here's a great winter day caching near Three Forks of the Montana Cache:

[+Team Perks]

Huh. Snow.

 

 

Oh, that's right. I think I've seen that stuff in movies.

 

Meanwhile, tomorrow's forecast is sunny and a high of 74.

 

Forget seasons, I'm going to the beach.

[+Team GPSaxophone]

Aaarrgghhh.....snow

 

Anything under 70 degrees Fahrenheit isn't fit for humans to live in.

It was a beautiful 65 today in Colorado Springs. We still have snow in our front yard from the snowstorms of 2 weeks ago

 

And I'm not complaining

[+greengenes]

My very first geocaching experience was in the snow (got it as an xmas present).

 

What's not to love?

 

There's No mosquitos, spiders, spider webs in the face, flies, snakes, bugs in general, poison ivy, leaves covering the cache, leaves covering the trees (reception), sweat dripping from my brow, and best of all, no Muggles.

[+flask]

 

When you get back, I'd be grateful if you could paint a similar word picture of Ithaca. My family comes from a lake or two over, on Owasco Lake. It is important land to me.

because you asked for it...

 

what i know of central new york i know from the years when i came of age.

 

the first time i was in ithaca i was sort of by myself; i came with a friend of a friend ans stayed overnight with friends of friends of friends but i was there for an audition and it was one of those great days in ithaca when every car on every vertical street has right-of-way, regardless of the traffic signs.

 

i remember driving with my mom through dryden and into a sunset, listening to the mozart clarinet quintet all the way from vermont because it was the only tape we had in the car, and all through central new york it's all flatland and easy rollers and then you come to the lip of one of those lakes and fly down into the bowl of it, always feeling the pull of one end or the other. never the middle, but the ends.

 

and ithaca is at the end of one of them and you teeter over the edge of the rim and down from triphammer road and if you come in twighlight all of the city is spread out below you and in front of you, all the way up onto south hill and you see the familiar buildings and all the lights just coming on and it's like landing in a plane, with the roar of the engines and everything seems to vibrate as you come streaming out into route 13 downtown, which they keep changing and now the two lanes are far enough apart to have buildings between them and by golly you'd better be in the right lane or you'll get carried halfway to elmira before you can stop it.

 

if you time it right, you can see all the way down through fifteen, twenty-two rows of traffic lights, all green for just a few moments.

 

but i know the lights of the octopus; i see clearly the neck of the swan and no matter how much they change the traffic patterns they can't change that. i know that the lights of cornell do not form and expletive if you look at them right, no matter what they tell the freshmen.

 

i've written assignments on napkins from steamer night at captain joe's reef, and although i never saw let alone drank the bastard series at the rongovian embassy, i've seen some of the carnage that remains afterward.

 

we played on the swings at stewart park after closing time, and we went to horseheads to play "cup of coffeee". woolworth's is gone, and so is the store where we'd buy three kinds of flavored popcorn and then try to get the woolworths' floorwalker to follow us into the lingerie department.

 

budget entertainment, we called it. two dollars each, and hours of fun.

 

and we watched the seasons turn: we went to upper buttermilk and bobbed for apples in the pools there. i had a friend out on coddington road who had late sweet corn and i learned that you can boil half an ear at a time in a standard hot pot and keep the half ears coming well into the evening.

 

we cut up fresh apples and ate them with last year's syrup, knowing in the spring we would go to the marathon maple festival and although i thumbed my nose at the time, new york maple is just as good as anyone else's, and sugar on snow is sugar on snow.

 

we endured winter. it rained and it snowed. a lot. and the wind was bitter. and there were long stretches of time when it was never really raining but never really not raining either, which we called "ithacation".

 

in the spring we went to treman and swam in the meltwater because we were so glad the winter was over and we didn't care that it really WAS meltwater; we swam in it anyway even though it took hours to warm up afterwards.

 

we were young and pretended to be free; we piled into cars to go to elmira to hear the symphony. we drove up to seneca falls to see the white deer and got there at sunset and saw glowing pink deer with fiery eyes. we went to eat at arturo's in east syracuse, where the city bumps up againt that tall grass wasteland of railroad and warehouse and interstate exchanges and you can get the "bad breath special", a plate of seafood and pasta bigger than your head and under ten dollars.

 

and when you take the 690 east from liverpool in the mornings with the sun in your eyes you feel most gloriously alive. you learn quickly to change lanes before you get flattened or you get dumped onto salina street.

 

i've watched the half moon reflected on onondaga lake, seen the ups and downs of employment in solvay. and now i've been to auburn and seen copper john. i've watched the yellow, yellow leaves fall onto the old canals, and i've see the giant windmills spin gracefullly, shining and red in a chittenango sunset.

 

the roads in the wildlife management areas are all square and straight and are built with no regard for steepness of terrain; they simply do not plow or sand them in winter and you can ride up and down those roads all through hunting season and nobody wonders who you are or why you're there as long as you keep your orange hat where they can see it.

 

so keep your orange hat on the dash; they won't hold your out-of-state plates against you. don't blink as you pass through alpine or lodi, not if you want to know you were there.

 

and just once in my life, i want to be in ithaca on new year's eve, when the change the number of the year by the lights of the towers.

 

just once.

 

soon, maybe.

[+Kathi & the Grouch]

wow.

 

oh, wow.

 

I laughed, I cried, I reminisced. flask, you have a True Gift.

If you aren't getting paid for that talent you should be.

 

--Kathi, who did some time on the hill in Ithaca

[+The Leprechauns]

flask, thank you so much for writing that. in honor of your post, i am replying in lowercase. your words were like "william faulkner comes to the finger lakes." such pretty and vivid pictures of ithaca and surrounding environs. i feel like you gave me an early christmas gift.

 

my own sense of place begins with moravia at one end of owasco lake, and radiates outwards from there as i grew older... to little hamlets like montville and sempronius to what i thought to be a big city, auburn at the other end of the lake, and then ultimately to ithaca, syracuse and rochester. i've since reached farther outward.

 

some of my best childhood memories are of riding the rollercoaster two lane roads through the finger lakes to some cool fishing spot, a nice park for a picnic, or a great uncle's house to go out on his boat. as a five year old, it was "fun hills." as i grew older, i learned to appreciate the power of the glaciers that carved those lakes out of the earth and left in between them the hills and ridges that provide the most glorious display of fall colors this side of new england. one trip down the hill into bristol and you'd swear you're in vermont. the fun of driving aimlessly around the countryside is something i rediscovered when i stumbled across geocaching.

 

i learned to appreciate topography, geography and maps here. with 20 mile long lakes in the way, you needed to know how to get there from here. i learned to navigate in the woods with just a map and compass here. those are all skills i still put to good use today as a geocacher.

 

the cool thing is, people have now hidden geocaches at many of these places that i vaguely remember from years gone by. i haven't visited much, especially now that my grandparents are gone. maybe next summer or fall, a road trip is in order.

 

thanks again for the virtual trip.

[+4leafclover]

very beautiful, flask.

[+Dreamin'Eagle]

I personally have never been to the finger lakes and the area you speak of. After reading your words and imagining the scenery I would love to go visit the area and bring home memories of my own. Thank you.

[+Ambrosia]

Glad to see you, flask.

 

Thank you for your beautiful descriptions, and also to you, lep.

[+Kevel]

Flask,

 

Just so you know. While you have been away it has been 50 degrees here in Vermont, So there is no more snow.

 

Peace

[+PeachyPA]

Flask, I have been to the Ithaca, Buttermilk Falls, Taughannock Falls, Watkins Glen, Cayuga Lake area. And it is as you describe! Thanks for a lovely description of the Finger Lakes area.

[+flask]

shucks. you guys have been very sweet.

 

right now i'm trying to catch up on all those logs.

 

stay tuned.