Back Home for a Northern Virginia visit - March 2013

March 15th - 18th, we took our metal-detecting show to northern Virginia.  We metal detected three different places.  My parents' house (shown above), a small park, and a middle school.  Here's what we found at my folks' house:

After asking a park ranger if we could have permission to search/dig at a national park, he informed us that digging in national parks was not permitted.  So, we moved on to a local middle school:

These items were found at a Northern Virginia middle school

 After a little bit of online research, we determined that this item is a Cub Scout neckerchief slide.



The next day, we braved the bone-chilling cold and winds, searching a local city park playground:

While searching a playground, we hit a "hot spot" right at the bottom of a slide, which is where we found most of these coins.  Note the penny with the cross cut out of it.  We also found another penny like this one later in the year at a different location.

One of our favorite items we have found so far, this Spongebob Squarepants character, "Patrick," is made of pewter and belongs to a special edition Monopoly game.  We typically  find lots of stray buttons at playgrounds.

Small-Town Park - Feb. 11, 2013

February 11th, we decided to go to another park in town that we had never been to before.  The park is out of the way and surrounded by a small wooded area.   It also has a basketball court that we decided to detect around, because we heard that bball courts were good places to look.  As you can see, if you ever need some spare change, look around the edges of basketball courts.

Also in the picture is some sort of lock (a friend suggested it could be from a car trunk), and a weight to balance a car tire.  Nothing too exciting, but we did find a nice place to re-visit later on.

 On this same day, we went back to another local park in a nearby town, locating the items shown in the picture above.  Sometimes you find rock-shaped metal mystery pieces as shown near the top left.  We keep them to one day clean up and hope to find something interesting inside.  If you notice on the bottom left, we found someone's dental floss.  We later found out that one of these pennies is a 1914 Wheat penny, valued between $5 and $25, depending upon the condition.  One more unusual button (with the four holes) and another zipper pull is also lying in the picture above. 

Back Home, at School - Feb. 10, 2013

Feb. 10th, we returned to one of our local schools.  As we are writing this entry several weeks after we found these items, you might be surprised to know how many bullets we find at schools.  On this day, we found two unfired .22 shells.  We also find a lot of broken zipper pulls and snaps.   There must be a lot of people walking around, trying to hold up their pants.

Also note the neat heart-shaped flag pin we found.

We returned to the fishing pier area for our final day of metal detecting, since we had good luck there previously.  We ended up having a fun day and digging up a lot of interesting finds.  From looking at the pictures above, you can see all the interesting pieces we located.

Picture #2 is our first silver item we have located, a small flower earring.  Picture #1 shows all of the findings for the day, which as usual have been strategically placed in a pleasing array by PPP, even turning a found piece of wire into a whale and adding a washer to make its eyeball.  We even located a couple of large items this time, including a pry bar and a can of partially-used silly-string.

Finally, in Picture #3, we located this mystery object, which on the outside looks like a rock formation which was formed over many years.  We were hoping the metal inside would be something unusual, like an old coin, so we took this mystery item home.  We soaked it in vinegar for about a week, taking it out every day and chipping away the debris as it loosened a little at a time.  As we began to chip away the outer coating, we began to speculate what was underneath.  To find out, tune in to a future post, entitled "Uncovering the Mystery Item."  (coming soon).

An Unusual Find Day - Feb. 5, 2013

Today, we started our detecting in the early afternoon.  After getting a slow start due to all our previous day's sightseeing, for the first time we decided to drive several miles down the beach toward a large fishing pier.  The pier is located on a public beach away from the hotels.

We were surprised at all the coins that people seem to lose on the public beach.  While digging at one signal, we located three quarters and several other coins, all in one spot.  Unfortunately, all of them were "clad" coins (no silver).  However, we did get one of our most exciting finds to date -- PPP dug up an Eisenhower Dollar!  Not that they are rare, but it is exciting to find one, considering the fact that you rarely ever get one in change nowadays.

The best we can figure out, the long black item in the picture is some sort of fishing lure or anchor, which has little silver rhinestones all over it.   We also dug up a small metal button, but nothing else of any real value that day.  We won't even take time to post our findings on February 6th, since it rained all day and all we found was a penny before we gave up.  So.....we hopped in the car and went shopping.

Back to the Beach - Feb. 4, 2013

After a couple weeks of cold weather and snow, we decided to return to Myrtle Beach for a second stay.  Of course, we can do that because we're retired.  Once again, we had a lot of fun at the beach, but we're not going to tell you about all that because this blog is about metal-detecting!  So we made sure to make time each day practicing our hobby.

On February 4th, we located the items shown above, which should have also included a nickel, but somehow didn't show up in this photo.  Maybe we accidentally used it for sales tax on lunch?