Tuesday, February 16

We started our drive by taking a TFC Global mailing to the Lititz Post Office. I was able to take a few “drive by” photos of ice sculptures on the Lititz streets.

The annual Lititz Fire & Ice Festival was canceled this year due to COVID (see Inge’s comment). It was changed to an Ice Walk.

The post office sculpture. At first glance, I thought it was a rabbit, then on closer inspection, I noticed that it was a butterfly

This backroad drive was my Valentine’s Day gift, which meant Cerwin would take time to stop when I wanted to take a photo. 🙂 He was the one who sometimes noticed prospective photo shoots.

The landscape is always more noticeable with snow on the ground. In this photo we were approaching Clay where we planned to have lunch at Fox Meadows Creamery. Middle Creek Wildlife Sanctuary is somewhere on the other side of the mountain where the snow geese and trumpeter swans are arriving.

We shared a Turkey Panini – which was messy and DELICIOUS.

We had a gift card (my birthday gift from Mark and Diane) and got side-tracked when our granddaughter Jana walked in line behind us. As we were talking, Cerwin paid cash – then as we were eating realized that he still had the gift card in his shirt pocket. Oh, well, that means we get to go back again. 🙂

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After lunch, we went to Paul B. Zimmerman’s to see the office that our son Jere is designing/overseeing for some of the office staff – including himself. We were delighted that he happened to be there and was able to give us a tour. The building was the original home of the Paul B. Zimmerman children. (The ones who now run the business – along with grandchildren.)

Jere is trying to restore it and keep as much of the original floor and doors as possible to honor the Zimmerman family. There is a lot of interesting history in the house – even the hiding place where Paul kept his shop’s money/income at the end of a day’s work. Today the Zimmerman businesses include several large hardware stores, metal fabricating and powder coating. Jere is also overseeing the construction of a new hardware store in Mechanicsburg.

I will take pictures some day when the house/office is finished.

From there we tried to find Middle Creek Wildlife Sanctuary from a new direction. (We are used to going there from RT 897 on the north side of the mountain.) That was fun because we were on some new back country roads.

As we went over the mountain, Cerwin noticed this wooden statue of Jesus.

Our next interesting sighting was this snowman family – which were slowly melting on this beautiful, warm day.

As we came out on the north side of the mountain – on a road we didn’t recognize – we noticed a flock of snow snow geese and knew we were in the right area.

Continued tomorrow.