Since Easter Sunday was a rainy day, we did an egg hunt inside the house before heading off to Mass. Later on, we had brunch at a friend's home.
Checking the shelves
Into the living room
Geocaching took me to one of Maryland's haunted places...Cry Baby Bridge. The legend goes that a distraught young woman threw her baby into the river below to avoid the scandal of out-of-wedlock motherhood. Another version has her driving a car off the bridge and dying though her child was not found. On dark, windy nights the baby can be heard crying, or so the story goes. The other story about the bridge is that the Maryland Goatman can be seen by people hanging around after dark.
Not so scary on a sunny spring morning
Another geocache had me discovering one of the boundary markers for the District of Columbia. The markers were put down in the 1790s when a survey team that included Benjamin Banneker marked off the 10-mile square area for the capital of the newly-formed United States of America. This particular marker is now in Virginia, part of the square given back to that state.
Imprisoned boundary marker
Yet another geocache had me visiting Brighton Dam, which blocks the Patuxent River and thereby creates the Triadelphia Reservoir. Right next to the reservoir is the Brighton Dam Azalea Garden which was in full bloom.
Triadelphia Reservoir seen from the dam
Road on the dam
Azalea garden seen from the dam
Entrance sign--do not enter!
Pink and red
White close up
Brighton Dam seen from the garden
My son was in a school production of The Comedy of Errors in the role of Antipholus of Syracuse, one of the main characters. He was brilliant. They had a big cast, so they had two different sets of actors play the main characters in alternating performances. In the other cast, my son was part of the Greek Chorus that did exposition drops at the beginning, end, and wherever needed in between.
We visited the Udvar-Hazy Center again (though the last visit was in 2015--ten years ago!). It's part of the Smithsonian Institute, specifically an off-shoot of the downtown DC Air and Space Museum that is the most popular of all the Smithsonians. Udvar-Hazy is split into two main areas, the Aviation Hangar and the Space Hangar., with some other parts too. We went through some of the Aviation Hangar first.
The Boeing FB-5 Hawk is a US Navy fighter plane from the 1920s (a hundred years ago!). It served on the USS Langley and the USS Saratoga, early aircraft carriers.
Boeing FB-5 Hawk
Interacting with a display
From early aviation history is the Nieuport 28C.1, a single-engine biplane from 1917 that the French sold to the Americans because they wanted something better during World War I. That didn't stop the USA from using the planes both in the military (they were used by the Navy in the first attempts to launch a plane from a ship, so before the Boeing above) and the private sector (Hollywood got a hold of some and used them in films).
Nieuport 28C.1
The Langley Aerodrome A looks like something cribbed from Leonardo da Vinci's sketchbooks. Stephen Langley's early attempt (1903) to build a human-size aircraft was based on much smaller models that worked and he thought he could just scale up the size. The result was a disaster that would not take off.
Aerodrome A
Front view
Probably the most famous airplane in this exhibit is the Boeing B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay, the bomber that was used to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945.
The Enola Gay
Cockpit of the Enola Gay
A lot of "stunt" planes are on display and posed in very acrobatic poses. In the back of this picture is the Concorde, the first supersonic passenger plane put in service. A collaboration of Aerospatiale of France and British Aircraft Corporation, it began service in the late 1970s, crossing the Atlantic in under four hours. The high speed was valuable to some customers but also very costly, making it economically difficult to keep going. Concordes eventually stopped transatlantic flights in the early 2000s (so still a long run).
Fun planes and fast plane
One of the extra parts of the center is the Mary Baker Engen Restoration Hangar, where many planes are refurbished and cleaned up for display here and at the downtown museum. My daughter was especially interested since they have machine shops and other tools a crafty person would love to use.
Restoration in progress!
The Space Hangar is dominated by the Space Shuttle Discovery, one of the fleet of American spacecraft that was the backbone of NASA activity from 1981 to the last flight in 2011. This was the last shuttle to fly and had the longest flight record, with 39 mission and over 150 million miles traveled.
Space Shuttle Discovery
Back of the shuttle
Toward the back is a display of various satellites from various countries.
Too many to name!
One item that caught my eye was the Mobile Quarantine Facility. Four of these were built for the Apollo program, specifically to quarantine astronauts returning from the Moon in case they brought back "lunar pathogens." Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins were "in residence" for 60 hours while NASA made sure they brought back nothing harmful for the rest of the Earth.
Mobile Quarantine Facility
Back in the Aviation Hangar, we saw the Wisk Gen 3 prototype of a eVTOL, or Electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing aircraft. It's a prototype only there for a little while.
Electric air vehicle!
The only plane in the whole museum that visitors are allowed to touch is a Cessna 172. Two volunteers help visitors get in and out of the vehicle. They also provide information about the plane, a popular personal aircraft. We were amazed that it had back seat, especially since there seemed to be no leg room. The guys explained that usually the seats are taken out and owners use the back for cargo.
Trying out a Cessna
Our kids also tried out a flight simulator which rotated them 360 degrees horizontally. They were supposed to be piloting, so maybe it was their fault? We parents were glad to be outside and, shamefully, enjoyed hearing their shouts of dismay as their simulated flight flipped.
The last plane we saw was the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, a stealth plane used starting in the 1970s as a supersonic reconnaissance plane. This particular plane served for 24 years in the United States Air Force and was delivered to the Smithsonian in 1990 after breaking a speed record flying from Los Angeles to Washington in a little over an hour.
Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird
The final part of our visit was to the Observation Tower. Seven stories up, visitors can see planes landing and taking off from the nearby Dulles International Airport.
A plane headed to the airport
Entrance and parking lot
Dulles Airport
The roof still had a lot of snow in early February 2026
The month started off with simmsquestD/T Challenge, a challenge cache where I needed a whole bunch of 2.0 difficulty and 2.0 terrain caches. I finally got the last one in November so I was able to take credit for this one. The OMXC Workout Tour - #3 OM Hill filled a micro find for a calendar day. It's a small cache near a high school. The Oakland Mills (the "OM") cross country (the "XC") team used the hill for a little extra challenge. My main challenge was the cold temperatures! Next was CCT - 30 Day Streak - Challenge Cache Trail, another mystery/challenge day filled on the calendar.
A grail cache I've been trying to finish forever finally got done with help from a friend. Crossroads of Maryland is a multi-cache with some of the information missing but the friend filled me in. The cache owner died recently so people are trying to adopt it to keep it going--it's all about the history of the area and based around the Laurel train station.
On a library run I found the nearby The Legacy of a Simple Idea, a very easy mystery to solve and cache to find. More challenging was Haslup Family Cemetery, hidden away in an industrial park on top of a small hill covered in trees and thorns.
The way a cemetery should look?
A helping hand
I found two more mysteries, Nap Time and R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A. Challenge, to fill some calendar days. Then I started another week with a coffee event and ended the week with a Community Celebration Event that was supposed to be at an Ikea cafeteria but it didn't open early enough. The event switched to a nearby McDonalds that happened to have a cache, The Hippocamp, just out back. That same day I had to travel over to Virginia for some errands and found Burke Lake Park, the oldest active cache in Virginia!
Near GZ
The cache!
I finally qualified for Emilie's 3/4 Challenge, which I had signed months ago in Indianapolis. I needed a hundred caches with the numerals 3 or 4 in the title, which I had completed with the last coffee meetup. I hosted the next coffee meetup, so now I have 101!
Our rental was nearer Scottsdale, so I did a lot of geocaching there. At Papago Park, I found Rocket Man, Boot Hill, Holey Tafoni!, and 1434. Rocket Man was the coolest of the set even though Holey Tafoni! was amazing too.
We also drove out to Goldfield, a tourist trap/recreation of a mining town, which had the amazing The O-Well 2112 TB & Coin Motel. I swapped some travel bugs and had to hide as the tourist train went by!
A cylindrical motel!
Log sheet
My geo-name on the sheet
In Phoenix proper, we visited Encanto Park for an Adventure Lab and its bonus cache. We drove over to the local library, another amazing location, for 910.285, a cache hidden inside the library.
The most beautiful part of the park
The geocache in the library
Inside the book
Informal Introductions was recommended at the meet-up, so I answered some trivia questions about a bunch of statues in a park by a building in downtown Phoenix.
Not one of the statues, but the same park
I also found By Request, a Letterbox cache placed for a visiting Pennsylvanian who didn't have a car and needed one on a special day (such nice cachers in AZ!), along with Stars-Stars, a mystery cache that I DNFed and then the owner gave me a clue so I came back and made the find along with discovering the initials of a Monday Morning Coffee Club member! Aloha from Hawaii - Arizona was another gratitude cache.
The month ended with 54 finds, a good chunk of them in Arizona. The year ended with a grand-total of 2266 caches since we started back in December 2003.
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