This weekend I went geocaching (geocaching.com) which I wrote all about last summer.  If you don’t know what I am talking about, go check it on the internet or on my new Web site which I am working on for this column.  Email me if you are interested in testing the new site. 

Some out-of-town friends came to visit my wife and me this weekend.  We told them about geocaching, so off we went in and around Harrisonburg to see what we could find.

We found a few caches before we got caught in the middle of the short but active hailstorm that hit Saturday afternoon.  And thanks to ShamRockerz for “Hard Core Cache“.  That is one of my favorite caches so far.

When we continued our caching adventures, we came into an area of woods that had some strange looking trees spread throughout. The husband of one of our friends is a hunter and woodsman but had never seen these trees before. He thought they looked like some type of locust but none of us knew for sure. (That would be me especially as my entire woodsman abilities could be written about in detail on a postcard.)

My wife took a couple of pictures of the trees and we went on about the rest of the day. The trees were strange looking to us as they had these extremely large thorns growing out of the side of the trunk and branches. There were groupings of these thorn-clusters all over the trees, some of which would really, really cause you some damage if you landed on them.

The trees were strange looking to us as they had these extremely large thorns growing out of the side of the trunk and branches.  There were groupings of these thorn-clusters all over the trees some of which would really, really cause you some damage if you landed on them.

Once we got back home, I Googled, “thorns on side of trees Virginia” and found they were honey locust trees. These trees are common in Virginia and the photos showed us that they were the exact ones we “discovered” in Harrisonburg. We found that the pods from honey locusts are edible but the pods from the black locusts are toxic. We also discovered that years ago the thorns were used for carpentry nails … I told you they could hurt.

I just think it is fascinating how even in nature a geek can use the Internet to learn things that they know absolutely nothing about. One thing I would like to know is who got someone to taste the honey and black locust pods to see which one was toxic?!

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