Monday, April 02, 2007

CAMPING - DAY 2

We spent a chunk of this day geocaching. Josiah downloaded the coordinates for about 20 caches before we left home. We also discovered that Dollar General is "near" the state park and carries milk and eggs (along with paper plates). We found 6 caches this day.

Our first cache was INTERESTING. Did you know that there were POW camps for German prisoners in America during WW2? We've studied this time period several times over our 17 years of homeschooling and had never unearthed the fact that there were POW camps here. There was at least one.....here in W TX. This first cache was hidden at the site of the camp/training field. The historical marker was interesting. We then drove back on the old road to see what we could see. The land has since been bought by ranchers, but you can see the old roads, some foundations etc. The cache itself was TEENY TINY and a bit of a challenge for us to find. We'd never encountered a cache smaller than a pill bottle. LOL We plan to do some specific research on this site and the topic in general. We'd like to know if there were other such camps during the war. We'd only heard of the Japanese Internment camps before this.

Our Second Cache took us to an old cemetery. One of the strange things about Mike and I, is that we enjoy visiting old cemeteries. Mike found in our very first pastorate that spending some time in a cemetery was helpful in maintaining perspective. This one was up a tree. The older two boys hammed it up - t-poisoning revisited...but this time we all looked for the pulley system. ::snort::
Found this marker for a confederate soldier to be interesting....
And this one struck me as well
Much to the children's relief, we eventually moved to our next cache. We found caches at old playgrounds, beside roads, across fields, and of COURSE, in the ever-present cactus patches....
I'm known for my "from the back of the pack" photos - why fight it?
Do you see the cache? We love big ammo boxes...we're able to load them up


8 comments:

Anonymous said...

HI:

So glad you all had fun. Looks like a great time. Even defrosting the fridge..... Not much to relate but today it is back to work for me.

love you all, proud of you all and etc.

l/p

Debbie said...

I had heard of the German POW camps, but only because of a book I read called "The Magic of Ordinary Days". This is a wonderful book, I'm sure you would enjoy it. Some of the main characters are Japanese internees and they talk about the German POWs working near by. It is really a wonderful book.

Sure looks like you had a great time camping.

Anonymous said...

One of our neighbor-couples were in a German POW camp in Arkansas. I wish I had to courage to ask about it but I'm always afraid questions will be seen as insensitive (Granny Ruth did not take our questions well when she was telling us about the Dust Bowl & Great Depression.)

And a geocaching funny -- my friends were hunting a cache on their way from OK to a skiing Spring Break in Colorado. They were in the middle of nowhere & suddenly lost all GPS info. They couldn't get any readings, maps, couldn't figure out where they were. Come to find out, they were near Los Alamos. And never did find the cache.

DeEtta @ Courageous Joy said...

Debbie, our library has this book. I'll have to get down there and pick it up "soon".

DeEtta @ Courageous Joy said...

Wow. It appears this is one of those black hole things that was not covered when I was taking US history...and really hasn't come up in the texts we've been using either. LOL I plan to do more reading..

Liz - yeah - I would imagine you need to be careful caching around Los Alamos. LOL

Anonymous said...

Looks like a fun trip.
I like the cemetery photos. I always found cemetery's quieter and less crowded than parks...nice place to get away and wonder. In a cemetery in WA I found a tall stone w/the claim the man had founded a town in OR.

DeEtta @ Courageous Joy said...

Wow Darshia. I do like to sit and think...and ponder about life...what you can tell from the things written on the tombstones....

Anonymous said...

Sis:

Do we ever understand the need for peace/quiet in my hometown and your first pastorate. :):(:(:

We would like to get to that town again just to visit and etc.

l/p