Adventuring Elf Sisters

Now for a current update. :) Yesterday my dad and I found three more geocaches- the first was really closeby in Rose Tree Park called dnf 777. That name was appropriate because dad had gone looking for this one and couldn't find it- turns out it was muggled and no longer there. It was replaced, though, and our GPS led us right to it.


Dad snagged it right out of the tree:


And as he was signing it:


I took a random picture of myself mostly to document the absurdity of dad trying to be stealthy in a park full of muggles. I was wearing a PINK SHIRT. Trust me, people would see me in the trees. On the plus side, in a pink shirt with a kitty on it, I certainly didn't look shady or dangerous. I have that going for me, I guess.



After leaving the park we went to my favorite geocaching location so far. This one just took my breath away and made me so glad I'd brought the camera! This one was called Bat Guano and is located in Oakbourne Park. When we pulled into the parking lot, this is what we saw:

Oh my gosh, that old Victorian house was so friggin' COOL! And it's in such great repair, too- usually old houses are just foundations, but this was a house! Or, rather a tiny mansion. Well, I'm pretty sure it was used as a woman's hospital thing for a long time. But whatever it was, it's so neat looking- patinaed ironwork, random windows, all sorts of odd shaped bits to the building...

And then we went to the actual cache location and my jaw dropped even more. The house may have been gorgeous, but this was just ... bizarre. What were those Victorian architects on, anyway?

That thing that looks like a weird misplaced castle turret with a weather vain at the top, windows scattered even more randomly than the house's, and is only about five feet wide inside? It's a water tower. I'm serious! Look, here's the gauge:


And if you still don't believe me, here's the plaque next to that old castle-looking door:

Man, I really wish we could have seen into the windows! Water tower though it may be, it's just so weird that I wanted to be able to see more of it.

Here I am in front of the tower:

(Darnit, now's a time I wish I was wearing one of my renfaire-ish costumes. Pink kitty shirt just does not get the same effect across.)

I made dad stand in front of it, too. He was as excited about this place as I was!


When we were leaving we pulled around to the front of the house so I could get a picture of that. Not as strange as the back/side, but still utterly gorgeous:


We're definitely going to have to come back so I can get more photos- I completely forgot to take pictures of the garage and bizarre fountain, for one thing. There are more caches in this park, so I'll do that when we get those. Oh, right, cache. I got so distracted by the architecture that I forgot to post a picture of that- it was a small one:


Looks like I'm not the only one so taken in by this location- I did a search for "Oakbourne Park" to try to do some quick research and I found someone's set of photos on flickr, complete with amusing blurbs. Go check those out- he took more than I did and has pictures of that fountain and garage.


And I suppose I should blog about the last cache we hit that day. Normally I would have thought this was really cool, but after getting to time travel back a few hundred years... well, I was still thinking about old buildings (and putting together a design in my head for the manor house that belongs to my D&D character's family).

This one was called Phobia #2 (we'd found one other Phobia one in that series- a beehive), but this one was fear of alcohol-related; or, rather, it was behind the beer distributor and had a matching cache container:

I seem to be getting pretty good at knowing which caches are going to be magnetic (I learned from one of the last caches we found), but dad was the one who realized that the poles are hollow (he's taller, so no wonder). We make a good caching pair because otherwise we wouldn't have found this one- he had been poking the wooden fence and I was poking the outside of the poles.

A very fun day- I'd missed geocaching but my health hasn't been too great this summer. Stupid asthma. Once the weather cools down, you can bet I'll be back to my wanderings!

I just realized that I never blogged about the three caches my dad and I found July 1st, so I'll throw together an update with pictures from that and hope I remember everything.

The first cache we hit that day was Rambo's Cache, the smallest one I've found so far:



Luckily the hint ("Magneficent") clued me in, although it left my dad clueless- he was looking all over on the bridge, but I went to the right spot, having caught the "magne" part of the clue. ;) We weren't actually the first to find, but we we the first after it had been fixed, so we're in the first spot on the log:


After that we headed to a nearby multi-cache called Hollow Paradise on the East Bradford Township Trail. The first part of this one involved finding this plaque on a bridge:

And doing a bit of math. Unfortunately my dad and I are terrible at math, so we were baffled on this one for a bit. Here's dad taking a rest at the start of the trail as we tried to work it out:

Eventually we realized what was wrong with our calculations ("d" does not equal "D"), though, and made our way uphill towards the cache. Here's a huge field we passed (or rather, had to walk through).


After wishing I'd had a walking stick to help me up the hill, I was utterly distracted by an AWESOME tree and grabbed my camera again. This reminded me so much of something out of my beloved Mirkwood that I couldn't resist!

It was covered in vines and tendrils and just looked so cool! And it turns out that while I was distracted, dad had realized that the tree was actually our destination. lol! He pulled the cache out of the hollow trunk and I got there in time to snap his picture:


In the cache was a neat toy knight's horse, so of course I took that one (I left a geocoin)- I think dad left a toy car and took a geocoin, this one certainly being large enough to hold swag. Needless to say, though, I was wishing that horse was a real one after knowing I had that long hike ahead of me again! Fortunately it was now downhill, but before leaving dad took a picture of me in front of the tree:


and I took one of the awesome branches:

See? It's like being home in Mirkwood, only with more sun coming through the trees. Heh. On the way downhill we passed another neat tree:


And we also passed a sign that made me laugh. I'm assuming "equine activities" don't involve poker or water polo. ;)

Since the only horse we saw was the plastic toy one I had stuck in my bag, I figured we were okay.


The last cache we hit that day was a quick one close to home- UPP which is in I think Upper Providence Park? (I think that's what the UPP stands for, anyway.) The GPS was acting wonky but luckily dad had been to that one already and steered me in the right direction. This was another big ammo can thing:

You can see the toy horse I got from the cache before this tucked into the mesh part of my bag (the white and red thing is the horse). Just thought I'd mention that. I took a bouncy ball and left one of my hemp bracelets.


And here's dad hiding it when we were done:

I think there are still a few more caches in that park, so we'll have to get them later.