Morton Fox's journal

I was at Fur 'the More in Hunt Valley, MD, this weekend. It's a first-year con so I'll hold the criticism, unless they really want to hear it. I do enjoy a small (473 attendees) con and it should not be in a hurry to grow. There were no lines at any time and none of the con events were filled to capacity. It's nice to still be able to find a seat even if one is a few minutes late to a panel or show. The fursuit parade (with only 94 suiters) was short and sweet. Even the Furlympics (fursuit games) benefitted from not having too large a crowd. With only around 20 participants, musical chairs and the limbo contest were pretty quick, and we soon got to the fun balloon-popping part of the games. As for the dances, I liked the Sock Hop on Saturday. This has been done at other cons before but it was really neat to have it at Frankie & Vinnie's, a 50s-style diner in the lower level of the hotel.

The hotel is in a rather good location because it's across the road from Hunt Valley Towne Center, a big strip mall with a variety of stores and restaurants. I had quite a number of meals from the Wegmans food court over there, although my roommate, jbadger, and I did venture out once for crab cakes at a local fish fry store. Unfortunately, it may not be a safe area. There was an armed robbery at the Hunt Valley McDonald's during the con and a few con attendees witnessed that. Be careful!

I didn't do too many geocaches Thursday on the way there. My main goal that day was to do "Tiger Tracks", a webcam cache in the vicinity of the Towson University tiger sculpture. I enjoyed a walk on the North Central Rail trail afterwards. Monday, on the way out of Hunt Valley, I geocached in scenic Oregon Ridge Park and took another long hike by the Loch Raven Reservoir. I should've stopped there but I ventured too close to Baltimore afterwards and encountered much dog poop, junk on the streets, and dangerous open manholes. Good thing I didn't fall into one of those!

( The caches... )

Sunday was sunny, 50-60°F. I headed out early in the morning to get to Wegmans in Warrington, PA, for the "Ducky's Breakfast and Fall Frolic, II" geocaching event. This is a two-part event with a breakfast portion and another meetup at a park later in the day. The breakfast part of the event was in the "Market Cafe" section of Wegmans, upstairs from the supermarket. I had no idea this supermarket had such a large dining area. It's nice. I had an egg and cheese muffin and an Everything Bagel. After that, we dispersed to do some new geocaches that were placed for this part of the event. I also did a few of the other geocaches in the area. I don't get out there very often so there were quite a lot.

In the afternoon, we met up again at the gazebo in Tamanend Park in Southampton for the second part of the event. There were 8 new geocaches placed specially for the event, so we did a loop hike around the park in a big group. We saved time by signing the log books as "Team Everyone". The event ended at around 3pm. Since there was still some daylight, I continued geocaching around Southampton, Feasterville-Trevose, Bensalem, and Northeast Philadelphia. I actually went quite a bit past sunset since the last 9 geocaches of the day were all in urban-type settings, not in the woods.

Since it was late enough by the time I was done geocaching, I decided to go to Philadelphia Chinatown and try to find a free street-parking space. I was lucky because the very first block I checked had a space. So I went to Banana Leaf for dinner and had roti canai and prawn mee.

( The caches... )