To my wife's and daughter's horror, when pressed for a birthday gift wish list, I said I always wanted a metal detector. They had dreadful visions of me in those white socks and sandals but bought me one anyways.

I live on a large wooded tract in northern VA that has been mostly undisturbed from the beginning of time - with some Civil War traffic. I've just been intrigued to check it out and see what might have landed on the ground especially from the Civil War period.

I have to say that my first few attempts have been disheartening. Our soil has a lot of iron and other natural metals, so the detector is going off constantly and for me at least, there's only so many holes I can dig in rocky clay before I say "&$@k it" for good. Maybe I need a more expensive detector to distinguish real objects from background metals: I don't know. If I don't find something real interesting in the next few attempts, there may be another reasonably priced detector on EBay soon.