Wine at the Shrine 2024

We visited the 2024 Wine at the Shrine fundraiser for Little Portion Farm and the Franciscan Center of Baltimore. Little Portion Farm is a small farm run on the grounds of the Shrine of Saint Anthony in Ellicott City, Maryland. They grow food and donate it to the poor through the Franciscan Center, so pairing the charities is natural. The event is hosted at the Shrine with tours of the farm, a stage for live music, food trucks, crafts, and wine sampling from many local vineyards. Other events were held throughout the day. We started with a tour of the farm.

Little Portion Farm display

A guide led us through the farm, showing the various plants and answering any questions.

Pathways in the farm

Wildflowers and beds

Starting an orchard

We were allowed to sample some of the fruits, like the raspberries below.

Raspberry bushes

Guide wasn't sure what these berries were

Squash--not sampled

All the produce is organic, so they take a lot of care in growing the food. The weeding is done by hand! They also use nature-friendly protection for the plants.

Covering the more delicate (and delectable) plants

Bugs can't get in!

Some peppers

We went inside the larger greenhouse tents. Tomato plants were set up along strings tied to the tent structure!

In the tent

Tomatoes!

A cool spider web outside the garden

The Franciscan Center also hands out toiletries. Visitors were able to put together bags of essential items as a way of helping out the center.

My kids doing there part

Special programs were held, like kids in the kitchen and wine appreciation workshops. We did not attend any but saw the kitchen set up inside the shrine.

Kitchen ready to go

I sampled a good variety of of wines. They also had meads and beers!

Charm City Meadworks offerings

Beers from Key Brewing Company

Wines from The Wine Collective

Penn Oaks offerings

I did really enjoy Circe Red from Sugarloaf Mountain Vineyard and bought a bottle to bring home. It was a fun afternoon, though there wasn't as much for the kids to do. We will probably attend again next year.

Geocaching June 2022

The month of June started off with a very easy find called If You Missed the Monday Coffee..., which refers to a group of geocachers who meet at a nearby cafe for coffee Monday mornings from 5:45 to 6:30. That might be too early for me, but maybe someday I will wake up too early and go.

Clearly not the cafe

The next day I found Camo Man, a geocache hidden in a very busy parking lot. I had to pretend to tie my shoe for a long time before I made the find.

A picture from the less busy side of the parking lot

"When You Need One" is the first of a series that I have not started. They have a lot of caches in downtown Laurel. I may be picking them off one by one to fill the calendar.

Over there

Kendal Ridge Stash was just off a trail and starting to get overgrown. The toughest part was the first ten feet from the paved trail. The rest was a walk in the woods.

Doesn't look like it is anywhere near civilization

On a trip to the Maryland City library, I found In the Laurel Oxbow, an EarthCache. EarthCaches are locations that have interesting and unusual geologic features. I had to answer some questions about the formation of the oxbow and observe the effects of nature on the area. I will probably drag the kids off to this location later in the summer. Read more about my visit at this previous blog post, if you haven't already seen it.

At the oxbow

I went to confession at Saint Anthony's Shrine and found Canticle of the Creatures, named after a famous prayer composed by Saint Francis. The spot had some creatures gathered nearby!

View from the cache

Another view from the cache

Cows in shade

I had a quick cache-and-dash at a nearby supermarket's parking lot. Purple Butterflies is a reference to how the cache container (a pill bottle) is decorated. It was in an obvious spot, if you are an experienced cacher.

Only an amateur would think it was in my sideview mirror

Ceonsillicaphobia #5 is a mystery cache that gave me a little trouble. I figured out the way to find the numbers but was off on a couple since there were multiple possibilities. The cache owner let me know which ones were off and I was able to come up with the right combination. The name refers to the fear of having an empty glass, so I had a hunch where the hide was. Too bad I made the find before noon, so I could not partake of the glass-filling goodness.

Need a customer? Take me!

I went back to the Navidad series by finding Clemons Crossing Navidad #3 - Shopping! at, you guessed it, a shopping center in Columbia, Maryland. The find was easy and I was able to buy groceries and check stuff out at the board game shop.

Quiet on a Tuesday morning

A nearby challenge cache is MD - 20 Souvenirs Challenge, where the finder cannot (or is supposed to not) log the find until they've been awarded at least 20 Souvenirs on their geocaching account. Souvenirs are issued for each state and country that you cache in, for special accomplishments or events, etc. It's basically an additional way to gamify the system. I have been awarded 57 souvenirs, so I logged my find.

View from the cache

I went back to Saint Anthony's Shrine to do some First Communion shopping and found another of their caches, F or C. The reference is to trails in the woods. One is called Saint Francis, one is called Saint Clare. The cache is near where the trails meet.

On the trail

A cool sign on the trail

Give Me A Call... is a cache and dash that would have been super-fast if it hadn't been for a muggle parked nearby. I waited a bit and made the find.

View from the cache

Another quick find was Laurel Walking About and it was just barely off the route to the grocery store.

View from the cache--don't come during the school year?

The next day I found Stones in the Gardner, a cache located in the Gardner-Anderson-Duvall cemetery in the middle of an industrial area. Judging by the tombstones, it began in 1882 and the last person was interred in 1930. The burial ground is far enough off the road to be invisible and hardly audible.

Another hidden cemetery in my area!

June is down to two calendar days without caching, so one goal was met this month. July looks very promising.

Saint Anthony Shrine Geocaches

We've visited the Shrine of Saint Anthony in Ellicott City many times.

The Shrine

Only recently I discovered that someone has placed geocaches on the grounds! The shrine has lots of trails with many interesting little spots. The first cache I went after was the easiest to find. I didn't even have to go into the woods.

A paved path

A small shelter for...

St. Maximilian Kolbe

The cache's name is Prisoner 16670. Maximilian Kolbe was born in Poland in 1894. At nine, he had a vision of the Virgin Mary who offered him the choice of two crowns--a red for martyrdom or a white for purity. He chose both. Later, he became a Franciscan priest. When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, they arrested Maximilian. He was sent to Auschwitz and given the number 16670. In July 1941, a prisoner escaped camp. The camp commander had all the prisoners line up and said that because of one man's escape, ten random men would die. One of the selected men, Francis Gajowniczek, begged to be released since he hoped to be reunited with his wife and children. Maximilian volunteered to take the man's place. The Nazis put him and the nine other men naked into a hole without food or water for two weeks. Maximilian had them praying and singing hymns. When all sound ceased inside the room, the Nazis came back in. Three men were still alive, one of them Maximilian. They were executed by lethal injection. He was declared a saint in 1982 by John Paul II.

The cache is near to the small shrine and only had space to swap small items. I traded my Where's Waldo pin for a peach pin.

Swag swap

The other caches are along the walking trails through the woods around the Shrine.

Entrance to adventure

The next cache I found was Tree House, which is indeed by a tree house in the middle of the woods. Why would Franciscan monks build a tree house? A nearby sign explains that Saint Anthony (who was a Franciscan) spent his last days in a room built in the branches of a walnut tree. He called it his sanctuary and was able to preach to the faithful who came to listen to him. This tree house is built in honor of Saint Anthony's last abode!

Tree house

View from the house

In the cache, someone had left some loose change. I traded my guardian angel coin (which seemed appropriate) for a quarter.

Swag swap #2

The course to the next cache, Great Commandment, took me past a small grotto with a statue of Saint Joseph.

Another area for meditation

The statue

I became a little bit turned around and wound up bushwhacking through some of the woods. Since it was late fall, the thorns and other obstacles weren't too bad. I did come on a small clearing that had lots of character. I imagine deer gathering there.

A clearing

Further on, I spotted a bench. The bench faces a tree with a cross on it. The cross represents the two great commandments Jesus gave in Matthew 22: 35-40, Mark 12:28-34, and Luke 10:27--first, love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind; second, love your neighbor as yourself.

The bench

The cross

I tried to drop off a CD that we'd had for a long time but the lid of the container would not go back on. So I swapped a bunny and an eraser for a car.

Fits length and width but not height

Swag swap #3

Walking along I saw a dramatically fallen tree.

Yikes!

The final cache is called 9-11 Memorial. It's another grove in the woods, this one with a cross made of rubble from the New York September 11 attack. Behind it are the Five Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary.

9-11 Memorial

The cross

The Agony in the Garden

The Scourging at the Pillar

The Crowning of Thorns

The Carrying of the Cross

The Crucifixion

The cache was nearby. I was there on Veterans Day, so I took the toy soldier (which seemed appropriate) and left a plastic cake. The cache also had some candy wrappers in it, which I took and threw out later.

Final swag swap

Geocaching at the shrine was a fun adventure and took about an hour, so it wasn't hard at all. Highly recommended!