Adventuring Elf Sisters

Yesterday I went geocaching again! :D This time I went with my fiance as well as my dad; my dad had once again found these caches earlier but came back with me and Josh as we looked. Our travels took us to the small Indian Acres park then back over near where dad and I had gone the other day to the Linvill Trail.

As we pulled up we noticed this structure, but didn't get a chance to explore it until we were leaving- I'll share it first, though:


A random chimney; we're trying to figure out what it was to and why the opening is facing downhill. My theory is that it was on an outside wall, maybe to prevent the fire from catching inside but still keep the building warm. Who knows, though?


Me and dad standing in front of it:


I did think it was neat that one of the families on the plaque is "Yarnall"; that's Josh's last name and it's highly likely that he's related to them:


Back to caching. The first one we hit was Phobia #10, a bee-themed cache. The GPS took us right to it and Josh saw it before I did:

This was a micro cache hidden in something not so micro. ;) We signed the log (and Josh drew his signature goblin drawing), but since this was a micro there was no room for swag.

I got some photos as we hiked over to the next cache. The creak running along the trail:


We passed some huge trees and I figured, what the heck, time for another group picture:


The light looked so pretty on the trees, but alas, it didn't come out so well on the camera:


This was a very old stone fountain that we passed. I wonder how long ago it worked?


This wood plaque was on a tree, but I have no idea why (trail marker?) and any writing that may have been on it was no longer there:


We thought I had gotten us lost (we went around a longer way than dad had gone before) so we made some jokes about hobbits and their direction sense (I offered to call Tom Bombadil if Josh and dad got eaten by a tree), but I finally lead us to our destination, Scouts' Stash. The GPS was pretty accurate here and after only a bit of looking we found the cache in a hollow log.


When I opened it up I went "Hey, a geocoin! ... Wait, that's the same geocoin!" I'd forgotten that dad had dropped off the travel slug coin he'd found a few days ago in this cache when he originally visited that morning, so no wonder it looked familiar. LOL!

I took a beetle toy (Josh loves bugs) and left a bracelet, then we signed the log and Josh doodled another Igik:

Dad changed his username to Yosemite1 after we got home, so he's still Gary87 in the logs he signed yesterday.

Then off to the 3rd cache! This one (X-Men Marks The Spot: Colossus) was a LOT harder to find than the other two- the GPS kept leading me in the wrong direction until Josh finally found the (very well camouflaged) cache. Of course after he called over to me, then the GPS told me the correct direction. Go figure! This one was really really cool and actually looked like a log and when we opened it up, we figured out the reason for the cache name:

The action figure was attached to the underside of the lid. See all that bumpy brownness? That's what the outside of the cache looked like- a log. That mummy rubber duckie was what I took from the cache when I left a bracelet.

We headed back to the car (detouring at the chimney) and drove over (well, drove to the street nearby) to the last cache of the day, Sink or Swim. We passed a lake on the way to it:


This was an easy one to find once we got there, but first we had to cross the stream. This was a lot further down than it looks and it took me a while to cross on those large rocks (I have very poor balance), but luckily I managed to not fall in. ;)


This cache was in a large old ammo box:

This one was filled with little toys, which was cool! We left a bracelet and a bunny toy my dad had picked up at another cache so I could get a silver-colored cat charm/pendant thing and- hooray- a geocoin! This is the first one I've gotten and it had just been put there probably not even an hour before (it was dropped off by someone sometime after dad had gone geocaching that morning and we were out in the early afternoon). I'll be moving this to a new cache very soon. :) I forgot to get a picture of the coin, though.

This logbook was a bit larger than the others, I think, so along with the drawing of Igik, Josh also wrote a cute "by the way, Igik says hi", but I forgot to get a picture of the log. Darnit!

This last cache was right down the hill from a swim club, so after a day of geocaching I was all sorts of jealous of the people we heard swimming!

I'm running out of bracelets to leave behind, so I think I'm going to make some keychains next so I can change things up a bit. :) If you notice the photos look better quality than before, that's because I found my sister's old digital camera and will now be using that instead of my cell phone. Yay, hand me downs!