Driving to A squared

On the road again today heading south for the Michigan vs. Indiana game tomorrow.

It's Veteran's Day - thank you for your service veterans one and all. When we were kids it was still called Armistice Day, named in honor of the end of WW I, the war to end all wars.

From Reed City to Big Rapids we did some geocaching - 8 caches to be exact! My personal favorite was "Feed the Fish" where I scraped my hand raw trying to get the cache container out of the hole in the concrete. We finally had to resort to using the pincers on the Leatherman to get at it, but we did achieve success! The cache was at the Paris Fish Hatchery, now defunct, which we used to visit all of the time when we were kids.

The light pole caches in the Walmart parking lot were quick and easy and not our favorite sort of cache - but we did three of them anyway!

We ate lunch at a place called The Bungalow which was right next door to the Wild Kingdom cache. It's a very nice restaurant - we would go there again.

It's always fun to drive through Big Rapids because it's my home town. Even though we moved away when I was five years old, I still have many happy memories of living there, and I can identify many landmarks and buildings that were important to our family sixty years ago! There is the Hanchett factory where Dad worked in the summertime - it's still there and it's still "Hanchett's". The old Big Rapids High School building where Dad taught and coached is now some sort of an academy, and his old football field is a parking lot. You can still see the small white church with a cross way up high on top of the steeple - it was responsible for my saying "turch" instead of church - it was "turch" because it had a T on top of it.

There was quite a bit of heavy northbound traffic, but we were relatively unaffected by it and we got to Snider's in good time. Eric and Ethan were there too, and Tammy came soon after, and we all had dinner together! Ethan is so cute and bouncy - we really enjoy him. We had a great time.

Pictures of Ethan are at the link above - Enjoy!