Happy 30Th Birthday Keith!!

WELCOME TO HOLLAND!
by Emily Pearl Kingsley

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel.

It's like this . . . When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guidebooks and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum, the Michelangelo David, the gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting. After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes and says, "Welcome to Holland." "Holland?" you say. "What do you mean Holland? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy." But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place. So you go out and buy new guidebooks. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met. It's just a different place. It's slower paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around, and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills, Holland has tulips, Holland even has Rembrandts. But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy, and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say, "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned." The pain of that will never go away, because the loss of that dream is a very significant loss. But if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you will never be free to enjoy the very special, very lovely things about Holland.

Killing two birds with one stone

I think we are getting obsessed with Geaocaching!!! Bruce and I are in VA now. Yesterday we decided to go geocaching again and found one on the Appalachian Trail. We drove about 22 miles along the Blue Ridge Mountains, to get to the trail that led to the geocache we were searching for. We then had to hike the trail for over two miles to find the cache. Along the way we met a couple of people hiking, saw some pretty flowers and the scenery was awesome, as usual along the Blue Ridge Mountains. There are some Lookout Points we stopped at on the way back down.

This is the first time we hiked any park of the AT and it was really nice. Geochacheing and hiking the AT was neat.

Treasure Hunting using GPS

Or Geocaching using a GPS instead of a map with an X on it. Bruce and I spent three hours today finding six caches in Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park. This is a very lovely park 10 miles south of Gainesville, FL

The first step is to log onto www.geocaching.com and type in the zip code for where ever you want to find some caches. We found lots of them in the general area. Then you need to transfer the coordinates from the website to your GPS. There are also some clues as to where the cache is...under a palm tree, on the ground covered with leaf debris, past house under tree, or under a dead oak tree.

A cache is a container with stuff in it. The container could be an ammo box, plastic food containers that lock shut, or even a rusty can. The stuff can be anything from small toys, stickers, pencils, Mardi Gras beads(LOL that is what I leave), or just about anything that is not X rated. You can take whatever trinket you want, as long as you leave a trinket behind. There is usually a little notebook for logging when you found the cache, your name, what you took and what you left.

What we found in all of the caches today, were Travel Bugs. These are bought by someone who puts them in caches and then when found by some else, they are taken to another cache. The TB has a registration number on it and you can log on and find out where it was started, where it has been and how many miles it traveled. You actually need to post(on the Geocaching site) where you found the TB and where you may be taking it. Some of the TB's have been in circulation for years. I found an alligator that is apparently in a race to somewhere. The TB that traveled the farthest was from Washington State and British Columbia. We found one from Maine, NC, CA, MI.

Geocaching is a great way to get outdoors and enjoy the hot, humid weather that has finally arrived in Florida. The only thing that makes me uncomfortable are the bugs, spiders, ticks and things that bite you when hiking around in the brush.