Did I ever tell you Max loves to go geocaching? It could be the walks, or the smells, or the outdoors, or THE SNACKS. Whenever he sees me heading to the door with my camouflaged lunch pail he plasters himself to the side of my leg. He wears a trackable dog tag around his neck which as of this writing (3/16/21) has logged 56,965.4 miles while visiting 7,364 geocaches.

On this trip we traveled to Lima, Ohio which incidentally is the location of Lima Locomotive Works, an American firm that manufactured railroad locomotives from the 1870s through the 1950s including Ephraim Shay's venerable geared locomotive design. However, on this trek we visited Ferguson Reservoir created in 1958 to expand the city of Lima’s municipal water supply. It has a surface area of 305 acres and a capacity of 2.2 billion gallons. Depths range from 3 to 33 feet. Max and I walked around the entire circumference of the lake and picked up 15 geocaches. It was a beautiful Sheltie day with warm temperatures, blue skies, puffy white clouds and light breezes. While retrieving one geocache at the shores of Lake Ferguson we paused for a quick selfie. Max, who abhors cameras, jumps out of character for a moment and slightly smiles for this heart warming photograph. 9/25/19

Photo courtesy of John Combs