The Toilet Seat Museum

The highlight of winter break’s caching expeditions? Without a doubt, it was the Toilet Seat Museum in San Antonio, TX.

Barney Smith runs the Toilet Seat Museum out of a shed in back of his house. He is well over 90 years old now, and cares for his ailing wife. You can just show up and knock on his door, but it is suggested in the cache description that you give him a call and arrange to go see the museum. Calling a stranger, asking to be shown around his property? Majorly uncomfortable. But the cache has 180 184 (and probably even more by the time you read this) favorite points so it must be good …

I called. Barney was delighted to show us the museum. He will be delighted to show you the museum. Just call. And go. He had us watch the videos of him on TV. He talked our ears off for 45 minutes! It was just fantastic. You should go. Go. Definitely go. Don’t hesitate. Barney is a gem; he won’t be here forever … do it now. You won’t regret it.

What will you see at the Museum? I think he has 1038 decorated seats at current count on a wide variety of subjects. Here’s a selection.

How it all began.

Librarians. Some of my best friends and favorite people.

Camera and 35 mm film canisters. Anyone remember those?

A turkey made from spoons and forks.

Timo signing the European Traveler Toilet Seat.

The European Traveler Toilet Seat with Timo’s home town marked and signed.

Computer age; this already looks outdated.

Dental implements. Yow.

Arrowheads.

Geocaching!

You’ll have to visit the museum to see inside.

Barney’s 90th birthday seat.

A mathematical toilet seat.

A million dollars on this seat.

Barney loves mail and visitors.

Jean Marie and Barney Smith, Artist.

Last piece of advice? This place is awesome. Don’t miss it.

End of Class

Our class wrapped up, with mixed emotions from me and Timo. Timo was traveling to attend a conference, and he missed the last class. He didn’t get to say goodbye to our students, which was sad. I was both glad and sad to end class myself. Glad because I, like everyone else, needed the holiday break. Sad because while it was work, it was fun.

I think every instructor wonders if we made a difference to our students. The end of the semester always brings reflections of what we did wrong and what we did right. One thing we really screwed up was not having students fill out informational notecards with photos and doing other activities early in the semester to help us learn names. It was much harder than we thought when we only saw our students once a week.

Our students mentioned they really liked going geocaching during class the best. The big question, should we do this again, is how would we do more of that? There are only so many geocaches to do nearby on campus, although maybe we could have students meet up at locations off campus for class. If we run the class again, we will have to check into the logistics of this. If it involved filling out field trip forms every week, that would be tough!

We know a few of our students will continue to geocache. Caitlin Meyer even hid a geocache at her home before class ended. MLC16 had found 88 geocaches before class started, and will almost certainly continue caching.

If anyone else is continuing to cache, we’d love to hear from you. We’d love to have you do a followup blog post too, if you were willing!

One of the many things we’ve done over the break is to go visit Caitlin’s cache in San Antonio. We visited with her and her Mom for a while, which was awesome. Caitlin organized a geocaching competition for the family Christmas gathering that was a big hit. I hope she’ll post again here to tell us about it.

Caitlin, Jean Marie and Timo near her cache in San Antonio, TX.

Field trip fun

I figure this is probably going to be the umpteenth time you have heard this story, but it is too good to not use as my blog post. So as you are (I assume) aware, a couple weeks ago we went on a class trip to Huntsville state park. As the day started out, I was expecting the worst. It had just recently gotten cold, and I was up 2 hours before I usually roll out of bed. I trekked on, however, as I really did need to get some more caches on my log (Plus, that replacement assignment wasn’t looking to inviting). As the day pressed on, our group was going at a pretty decent pace. We had found every cache that we had looked for and we had found them with relative ease (keyword: relative). We had early on decided that using trails was for those not gifted in the art of geocaching and in the beginning, going straight from cache to cache had worked out pretty well. Then came ‘Stumped.’ Lame jokes aside this cache really did stump us. We went for the direct on approach, hiking through what we thought was a field of waist high grass. As it turns out, it was a marsh. Unfortunately, we didn’t realize this until it was far beyond too late. We soon became drenched (did I mention is was cold outside?) and when we finally got out and found the actual cache, a group member came upon the conclusion that she had lost her phone. We decided to go back and give searching for it a shot (with little hope that we’d actually find it). As we trenched our way back into the marsh and got re-soaked (and almost lost a shoe) we began searching for it. I guess luck was on are side or something that day because not even a minute after searching for it, it was found, thus turning a depressing episode into a laughable experience. Anyways, yeah, the whole event definitely made for a memorable time and I’m really glad I decided not to sleep through the trip.

Really late……

I had completely forgotten about my last blog post! I think that since the break was coming up and I just wanted to go home my mind went blank.

I went geocaching recently with my dad and my sister. We were actually very successful this time! We out behind the elementary school by my house and found a couple there. It took a long time to find all of them, but luckily I had more time to actually look for them. I think the most interesting one I found was the cache that was a baby head. It was really creepy, but it was a fun find! The next day before I came back to college station we went out again and my mom came also. I had told her about it so she was pretty excited to go. This time we went out a little further away from my house and found a couple of caches there. My mom really enjoyed it, and my sister already likes it so she even made her own account on geocaching.com. There were so many caches in the area but there wasn’t that much time to keep looking, so hopefully I’ll go back one day.

Hope everyone has a good winter break!!

San Marcos

Howdy!

Sorry I didn’t blog on Friday like I was supposed to. I was with family and enjoying my break. However, I do have some new stories for y’all.

On the way back from San Antonio, I stopped in San Marcos on Sunday for the day to hang out with some friends from Texas State. I suggested going geocaching to get outta the dorms and see some new places. So for about 3 hours, we drove around San Marcos, seeing the river and enjoying the beautiful day. We found 5 geocaches, but our last one took us about 40 minutes to nab. It honestly took entirely too long, and it was thoroughly frustrating. But it was a great feeling when we got it!

Hopefully y’alls breaks were awesome like mine was. It was shorter than I would have liked, but we got a pretty long one coming up so I guess I cannot complain. All this holiday music is putting me in good moods!!

Thanks and Gig’em and Happy Holidays!

Last blog post already?!

Howdy!

I hope everyone’s break was fantastic and that studying for finals is going great! I can not BELIEVE that this is semester is practically over already! It just seems to have flown by, there’s no way that we are already halfway through our first semester of college!

Over this semester I’ve learned plenty of things that I’ll carry with me through life but one that I’m the most happy about would have to be geocaching! This class has been a ton of fun and I know that the adventures I’ve gone on searching for caches have been just as great!

With the semester winding down I for one know I still have a couple of caches to find and even more to log (I’ll admit I’m not so great at remembering to do that…) but once I have them all in for this class I know that I will continue to go out searching for caches!

Closing out this final blog post I hope that all of you get the classes you need for this next semester without any trouble, I for one know that waking up at 5:45 tomorrow morning for registration was not on my to-do list but hopefully it will pay off!

Thanks and Gig ‘Em! 🙂

Geocaching Date?!

With the end of Corps Brass and the start of the Thanksgiving holiday, life was very peaceful for me over the break. Now back in the swing of things, I have begun studying for finals and preparing to experience a successful first semester at Texas A&M. Before that happened though something very interesting happened to a friend of mine.

Outside Kyle Field at gate 14, my buddy had a guest ticket that his brother couldn’t use because he was sick. I stood with him scoping out the crowd trying to find him a date. He found a pretty sophomore girl talking on the phone and pretended to be hanging out with me while he waited for her to hang up. She stood with her friend who was also attractive but we later found out she attends TU hsssssss! I waited with him and pretended to be busy while she continued to talk. Finally, she hung up and began to make her way to the gate with her friend. I watched from a distance as Dale (my buddy) made his way after her and stopped her. From where I stood it looked bad, there were awkward smiles and nodding of heads and at the conclusion of the exchange, Dale walked back to me shaking his head. But I noticed that the girl had turned around to follow him and I pointed discreetly and turned away. She had changed her mind and decided to go to the last home game of the season with my buddy who she just met.

We all went out that night after the game to go dancing but Harry’s was closed for Thanksgiving Weekend hssssss! While we were trying to figure out to do with the night Dale asked if I still had the geocaching app on my phone. When I asked why he said he wanted to borrow my phone and go hunt for caches with his date! I just about had a fit, I had no idea geocaching was going to be a chick magnet for my buddies!

Anyway I thought that was a pretty funny story to share with you guys after the break. Study hard for your finals!

Last Blogpost

Howdy

Sadly, this is the last blog post I will make of this semester. My first semester of college has been hectic to say the least and has gone by too fast but I’m ready to start the next. Although our geocaching class is ending I will defiantly continue to geocache. I’m glad that I chose this class because if I didn’t I would have not known anything about geocaching. Now, not only do I know more about it now but im basically a pro geocacher.

Geocaching this semester has taken me to some awesome places on campus that I never knew existed. Thanks to all the caches I’ve found I pretty much know the campus like the back of my hand. Now our class can show people all the awesome locations at A&M with our final cache project. If you think your up to the challenge you should defiantly check out our class cache when we finish it. It will show you over 100 years of tradition that keeps TAMU alive.

 

Thanks and Gig em

Tis the Season

Howdy! 

I hope everyones thanksgiving breaks have gone as well as mine has! I have had such a blessed and happy thanksgiving. For those who don’t know me well, I was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 13 and underwent 14 rounds of chemo and 31 rounds of radiation. I am very blessed to say that I am now in remission as of 2009. Every 3 months I have to go to the hospital for scans and Tuesday I had to leave school early to be there. All my scans came back clear, praise God! I was a little apprehensive about leaving school because I missed a huge assignment in history but I spoke to my professor who was very understanding. Besides being in remission, I am also thankful for the time I got to spend with my family, my best friend, and other loved ones. It was so great to have everyone together again since I have been away.

Speaking of which, this semester has flown by! I cannot believe it is almost over and that I am preparing for finals! It is a little bittersweet because I have so enjoyed being a college student at the best university in the world! Gig’em! But I know that the Christmas holiday will be nice and then there are many more semesters to come. 

I hope this post finds everyone feeling thankful for what they have been blessed with this year and happy and healthy. Happy Thanksgiving, gig’em, and God bless! 

The Travel Bug Adventure Part 2

The travel bug I had wanted to indirectly travel to Berlin, Germany then back to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where it had started. My family had a spring break trip planned to go up to North Carolina to visit my grandparents and some cousins, so I made a plan to bring the travel bug and drop it off some place up there. I expressed this desire to one of my cousins who is just a bit younger than me and he said he knew of one cache that was quite large and agreed to take me there.

When the time came to go find the cache my sister and two other cousins decided to come with us. The cache was located in a park so those of us who hadn’t found this one assumed it wouldn’t be hard to access. We walked down a path a little ways then had to climb down a hill with no path. After that there was a very steep cliff part that we had to get down. My sister and other cousins almost gave up at that point but eventually made it down. The next segment of the journey was made up of crossing a small creek and then crossing another. I had no problem crossing the two creeks but my sister ended up falling in and getting soaking wet. At that point she refused to cross creek number two as did the other two cousins.

It was a short distance from the creeks to the cache so the travel bug was dropped off relatively quickly after that. When we returned to my grandparents house my sister got some questioning looks from the grandparents and aunts and uncles. I don’t think my dad was surprised at all that his daughter was the one who fell in.