Saturday, August 31, 2013

Well, it has been ten fun filled days, but as it is said, “all good things must come to an end”.  This is the day that Hugo is going back to France.

 

But, we still had a couple of interesting things to do before he got on the airplane. We left our house early so we could do these two last adventures.

Since this was the final day for our 31 Days of August geocaching challenge, we needed to find at least one geocache today. We selected one that was at a hotel near the airport and it was especially created to be a Travel Bug hotel. I had a travel bug that needed to be moved and this seemed like the perfect place to leave it. So, this was the very last geocache that Hugo found in the U.S. for this year. He decided to retrieve another Travel Bug that was inside the cache. It has recently been released and has a mission to travel to Scandinavia. So Hugo will drop his Travel Bug in a cache somewhere in France and someone else can move it along.

 

The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center which is part of the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum is in Chantilly, VA and it is not far from Dulles Airport. This was our second adventure today.

 

 

There are very many airplanes displayed in this building and we did not have time to take a good look at all of them. The most impressive for me is the French Concord SST.

 

  

Also very interesting is the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird which I know as the Spy Plane.

The most popular exhibit seems to be the Space Shuttle, Discovery.

  

This was my third visit to this museum and I still want to go back and spend a lot more time there.

 

We ate lunch at McDonald’s at the museum and then made the short drive to the airport. 

 Too soon, it seemed that Hugo had checked his bag and was ready to pass through the security. He told us that he was amazed that he understood everything the ticket person said to him in English. So, I think that proves that Hugo has progressed very, very well and quickly in his understanding and use of English during the past ten days. I told him that I think his English class at school this year will be very easy for him. I cannot think of anything else he can learn except maybe a few vocabulary words because he seems to be able to use the verbs correctly most of the time and his sentences are good.

So we didn’t say “goodbye” to Hugo. Instead, we said “see you soon”. He realizes that he always has a place to sleep at our house. 

 

 We know Hugo's family is going to be very happy to have him back home again.

Friday, August 30, 2013

This is the last full day that Hugo is going to be with us. Cordell asked him this morning if he wanted to go geocaching today and Hugo enthusiastically replied, “YES, YES”! Well, this is the 30^th day of our August geocaching challenge and we have succeeded in finding a cache every day. So we must go geocaching.

Since we had no other plans for this day, we decided to drive across the Patuxent River to Charles County and look for a few geocaches there. I remembered that we were going to pass a geocache that took Cordell and me three times to find. We decided that this was to be Hugo’s final examination for his caching lessons.

And so, we sat on a bench and checked our e-mail and looked at Facebook while Hugo was searching, searching, searching. We gave him a clue and he continued to search and search and search. 

 

We gave him another clue and the searching continued. And we were able to finish reading our e-mail and put some posts on Facebook and take a long rest!

 Finally, after 45 minutes had passed, Hugo was able to see what he needed to see and he retrieved the cache! Success!! He passed his examination and has received a certificate.

 For the remainder of our geocaching time, we looked for much easier caches. We found seven new caches today and Hugo found eight. But, unfortunately there was one that none of us could find. We even returned to it for a second time this day to look again before coming back home, but no luck for us.

 

 Shortly after we returned home, Hugo received a video call from his family and I could see that they were excited about having him back in France again. We ate our last dinner together and it was hard to realize that ten days have passed so quickly with Hugo.

Thursday, August 29, 2013

Today, Cordell needed to check out two of his geocaches which he had placed and which need maintenance. So, he and Hugo set out while I stayed behind and did some household chores. While they were out, Cordell took Hugo to look for some caches that we had previously found. We are trying to give Hugo a good experience with a variety of caches.

We had a lunch of grilled cheeses sandwiches with sliced tomatoes. Then we gathered up our things and rode over to Janelle’s house. She had finished her school lessons so she and Corinne joined us and we went to Brownie’s Beach which is on the Chesapeake Bay and just over the hill from their house. Corinne is very adept at finding shark’s teeth, so they spent some time doing that.

Janelle noticed an area where crabs and tiny fish seemed trapped and separated from the bay. She and Hugo began digging out a canal of sorts to give the crabs access to the deeper waters of the bay. Once the connection was made, the force of the water widened the canal considerably. Janelle counted 26 blue crabs that took a ride through the canal and entered the bay. We were wondering if there was going to be a news report on the TV this evening about the creek or swamp mysteriously being drained of water and the scientists had no answer to how it occurred!

It was beautiful weather on the beach and we would have liked to have stayed longer, but we had more plans for this evening.

Back at home, we had time for a quick shower and then we went to a pizza shop in Dunkirk for a geocaching event. Kelly and Alexis joined us there.  Our former neighbor’s son, Bruce, was there. He is an adult now and we hadn’t seen him since he was a boy. He is a new geocacher, too. Again, we were able to spend some time with other people and talk about our geocaching adventures.

There are several geocaches in Dunkirk and when the event was over, we took Hugo, Kelly, Alexis and Bruce to look for them. I realized two days ago that Hugo has become an experienced geocacher now and it was quite evident during the hunts this evening. He was able to see that he had a lot more knowledge and experience than the others. We all enjoyed spending this time together and were sorry we had to stop, but Alexis needed to get home since she has school tomorrow and Kelly was very tired from a long day of working.

Hugo watched the Orioles baseball game on TV with us again and we were delighted that they won this important game.

Wednesday, August 28, 1013

This was another day to continue Hugo’s geocaching education. Our first and most important goal was to find the Mona Lisa cache. It is a puzzle cache that we had tried to solve before Hugo’s family had to return to France. We thought it would be a perfect cache to search for together since this painting is in the Louvre museum in Paris. However, we do not have a lot of experience with puzzle caches and Hugo’s family left. It took Cordell several more days before he found the answer that gave us the numbers we needed to put into our GPS so that we could find the location of Mona Lisa. After that it was easy to find it.

There was a little light rain falling on and off all day, but that did not stop us from looking for more caches. We found 9 new geocaches and Hugo found 12. Today, he has begun to find some caches before Cordell and I see them. I consider that he is now a very experienced geocacher.

 

The last one Hugo found today was a very, very difficult one. In fact, when Cordell and I first looked for it, we did not find it. We went back almost a year ago with our geocaching friend, Melli, who had not found it her first time either. But, she had been thinking a lot about this cache and she had an idea of where it might be hidden. We looked in that place and it still was not easy to see it. But we found it with Melli.

We stopped there and told Hugo that we were not going to give him any extra information. He had to find this one with no clues from us. He made a good search and I was surprised when he did go to the place where the cache is placed. But, he couldn’t find the cache. Then Cordell looked because he knew where we had found it previously and even Cordell could not find it. So, we concluded that the cache must be missing and we were very disappointed because this is a super cache and we wanted Hugo to find it.

We returned to our car and began to drive across the parking lot to a store where I wanted to buy a few items. As we were driving, Cordell mentioned that the place he looked had a rock in it. I then asked him if he tried to remove the rock and look behind it. He had not. He immediately turned the car around and we went back to look for this cache again. It was raining a bit more so I stayed in the car while they looked again. And this time, Hugo finally saw something strange and different and when he looked more closely he was able to pull out the cache!!

 

  After we finished eating our dinner tonight, we took Hugo to Happy Harbor Marina. In addition to being a place for boats to dock, it has a small restaurant. Every Wednesday night is “open mike” where anyone can come to play and sing Bluegrass Music. This music is traditionally played on acoustic stringed instruments and was inspired by the music of Appalachia. It has mixed roots in Scottish, Welsh, Irish and English. I grew up listening to this music in the mountains of south west Virginia and I thought Hugo might enjoy hearing it too.

So it has been another good day for us.