Adventuring Elf Sisters

After about three months, finally had the opportunity to go geocaching again. Hooray! And after snagging 14, I found that I'm not rusty. ;) Snagged a neat one this past weekend that I'll share a picture of later (it's on Josh's phone so I don't have the photos), so I'll share some of the fun ones from geocaching with my dad yesterday.

Mostly I want to share pictures from one of the more awesome locations. My favorite, hands down, was Italian Water Gardens Ruins. I have no idea if this was once part of someone's estate or if it was a sort of park, but I LOVE old ruins and architecture, so this was awesome! It was neat because it was so overgrown that unless you know it was there, you would just keep walking down the path right next to it. This is the view from near the top; you can sorta make out the round walks circling it:

Walking down to the level of the walls, you can see where I'm assuming there was once a large fountain in the center (the path/walking trail is only a few feet from this, at the level of the top of that archway).




Here's a view very much downhill; this location was very much on a hill. Looks like that was once the outer wall with stairs leading down. In PA there's lots of old stairs leading to nowhere and if only there was a way to know what these places once were!


Here are me and dad in front of the center arch:




Here's one of the carved pillar things on either side of the arch (this one was clear- the other was covered in ivy). Clearly a lot of work went into this place, so what was it?




There were pipes halfway up in the wall next to this... so was the entire ground floor once a pool of water? Or were there separate pools, like how that stone this is under the arch?

Here's a look at the archway thing from behind a fallen tree. Once this all would have been clear, I'm assuming.


And this huge pine tree on top of the wall- was this just a tiny tree when this place was used? Or did it grow since then?


I wonder if there's a way to find out what this place was originally built for? Curious Meri is curious.

Here's the creek as we were leaving the Water Gardens- very peaceful if not for the fact that a highway was directly above us!



We found a bunch more caches that day, so I'll just share some pictures quickly rather than ramble about the locations. The other pretty location was Pom Poms Cache- or, rather, it would have been pretty if we hadn't had a hurricane earlier this month, so the area was very sandy (from the creek overflowing) and there was driftwood all over the place. The benches looked creepy! Luckily there were workmen there cleaning up the fallen trees and such.


This picture is much prettier:


Although when I went to sit down on a bench to sign the cache log, I almost sat on a helicopter! This must have been put there recently because it had a flower sticking out of it- and the recent storms would have washed it away. I think this entire area had been under water.


And for some random pictures, we found a cache themed off the fear of cats- it had kitty stickers on it. Yay, kitties!


Another was inside a gazebo:


And one that stuck me in my natural environment: a tree. I'm really good at locating these parking lot ones. ;)


Most of the rest were simple caches, so I won't get into those here. This post is long enough! ;) Hopefully I'll be going caching again soon. I'd missed it!