Expectant mothers, people with heart conditions, people prone to motion sickness, and small children may read this Chronicle. No geocaches were found in the making of this Chronicle. Those seeking wild and crazy stories of geocache seeking may prefer to take an earlier Chronicle, or wait for the next one.

Thank you for your attention.

“Sioneva! She flies! And she likes it!”

Peter Pan (sort of)

This long-anticipated trip started out like they all do... with a lot of anxiety! You see... that's a requirement for any trip our trio makes. The Untrackable Geodad was scheduled to fly out to Maryland on December 23, to check on the status of a son-in-law, two daughters, and five grandchildren (his, not mine!), while I was scheduled to depart on an early morning flight on Christmas Eve, bound for Philadelphia to report on the doings of “the Brother”. (That, btw, is his actual geocaching name. Go figure.) And a very big blizzard was scheduled to hit the Omaha area the night of the 23^rd, stretching into and past Christmas Day.

Two of the three scheduled events were delayed... my flight, and the blizzard. Happily, they were delayed in the right order! The flight took off an hour late, the main force of the blizzard struck three hours after that. Sioneva escaped! Yes! Non-stop to Newark, a train ride to 30^th Street Station in Philly, and “the Brother” was there to meet her!

“MEOW!” *shred, shred*

Angry interjection of the Sioncat

Oh, yes. Did I forget to mention? The Trackable Geokitten came with me this time, to make up for me leaving her behind in Texas. Not that she enjoyed it very much... First, she was stuffed in my suitcase.  Then, “the Brother”... well, see for yourself. Then, to top it off, there was a mouse in the house, and she actually caught it – but we wouldn't let her eat it!

That mouse, by the way, was a travelbug called “Jerry, no Tom.” And it wanted to meet Toms! There was only one Tom that I knew of that it could meet, and so it did...

“

It was shipped in here six years ago, busted. It is *still* busted.”

Donovan's Reef

“the Brother” does have a car – unfortunately it was not in operation while I was visiting him. This did limit mobility considerably, not to mention curtailing any serious caching. I needed caches of good size, but the only caches within walking distance in Ambler were micros. Except for one playground cache, .7 miles off – and I walked to that one, was closely observed by kids playing basketball nearby, and decided not to hunt. It would have been bad to leave a bunch of Tbs in it, and then have it disappear!

We made do, though. I spent a lot of time drawing up elaborate bus/train schedules that went completely unused. It filled up a good chunk of a very rainy Saturday, at least! It rained constantly on Saturday, which had the happy side-effect of getting rid of all the snow. And it was a warm rain, and so I took a walk to that playground cache. Of course, I have a cold now, but who's counting?

“Here's the 'very sorry song'. Won't you help and sing along?” 
“Bum bum bum” 
“I blew it!” 
“He's sorry” 
“I knew it!” 
“So sorry”

Calvin & Hobbes

Monday was going to be our huge geocaching day – our “walk around Philadelphia and drop off alll these travel bugs” day. It was chilly, but not too bad, sunny, nice day for walking. We are easily distracted though... and we stopped along the way to play a few more games. Chess... and Bingo... and dominoes... and Sorry. The pieces were so hard to move though!

And here I am, doing the famous Sioneva Kilroy over the top of the Monopoly hat. Sorry, folks, but no blue bow!

Monday was not the day for geocaching, alas. Not for successful geocaching. I was seeking small, regular, and large caches, since I had to drop the Tbs, but we didn't have any luck. Downtown Philadelphia doesn't have so many of that size, for some odd reason, and we DNF'ed on one in a small park – fourth DNF in a row, I think. We did see the indentation where it used to be. So we went after “Egyptian Jewels” - ended up searching at least eight planters in the heart of the jewelry district. Several times. I'd DNF'ed on it before, too, LAST time I was in Philly.

Time was a'wasting, and we were pulling my suitcase-on-wheels behind us like Marley's ghost lugging his chain... my train back to Newark was scheduled to leave at 5:55, so we finally had to call it and headed for the train station and a beer before I had to leave. Ended up leaving all the TBs with “the Brother”, so he could grab them all and drop them into a cache at some later date.

I was sad to leave. Ambler had some great, old stone buildings – on my aborted Playground cache hunt, I'd taken a lot of great pictures, which I will not inflict on others. Philadelphia wasn't shabby in terms of scenic buildings either!

“Without them: disorder... catastrophe! Anarchy! In short, you have a ghastly mess!”

Mary Poppins

Never trust serendipity. Not only is it hard to spell, it's impossible to capture. By some wonderful coincidence, the geodad and I had been booked on the exact same flight home from Newark, coming in from two separate cities. So we laid our plans accordingly.

Well. That didn't take al-Qaeda into account, or attacks on airplanes, now did it? His flight from Baltimore was delayed three hours, and he missed the connecting flight home to Nebraska. Continental would have rebooked him on the next flight – which was 8 am in the morning... but I managed to convince them to rebook me on the same flight without charging me any rebooking fees or whatnot. It was touch and go there for a bit, though, with the gate agent wanting to close the door and get the aircraft off, and me raising a ruckus at customer service...

We spent the night in Newark, at a cheap little motel, and flew home the next day. There was ICE in the Missouri River – these Nebraskans just can't keep that thing clean! - and we had to shovel out the car at the airport, quite literally. All in all, though – a great trip, even if my find count did not go up!

Until the next Chronicle... here's to you!