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!