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!

Or, rather, apple-themed geocaches. Today I went on a quest to find a trio of connected caches located on the Middletown Trails (near Linvilla Orchards) named after apples: McIntosh, Honey Crisp, and Granny Smith.

Dad had found these last week but went with me so that I could find them (my fiancé didn't come along this time). After a stroll along the trail (which was rather strange, since it butted right up against a neighborhood and their yards and some of the houses didn't even have trees planted to block their yards from the trail), we reached the first cache, "McIntosh". This was pretty easy to find because the GPS was telling me I was standing right on top of it; after spinning in a circle to figure out a likely spot, I found it in a log.


I signed the log:

Took what I thought was a geocoin (turns out it was Pathtag- I signed into that site and logged it when I got home) and left one of my bracelets (a yellow and orange one).

We then headed off to find the second part of this cache trifecta. This time the GPS was acting a bit screwy and kept leading me off in random directions. My dad helped by telling me I'd gone past it and after picking a wrong tree to look around, I found it in a hollow tree a few feet away.


I signed the log (left a brown wooden bracelet and took an hourglass- how neat! I love hourglasses!) and noticed the drawing on the back of said log; you can sorta see it in this picture- it's an arrow with a criss-cross pattern:

That means train track time! Here I was tempted to walk back to the car because I was getting very tired and worn out, but I'm glad I didn't because the 3rd part of the cache series was very close by.

Sure enough, after passing some stone ruins, we made our way to a very overgrown (and very old) set of train tracks. I didn't get pictures because ... well, you could barely see them this time of year. We couldn't actually go onto the tracks where the drawing told us because a large branch had fallen on them, lol. Eventually I found the cache (much quicker than my dad had, but I did have him there giving me the general area it was in) hidden just off the tracks in a place where the wood beam had split.

This cache had some cool swag, too (all three of these did- it was awesome!), and I couldn't decide between goofy glass:

(I really wish that photo had turned out better! Darn phone camera!)
Or a useful pair of gloves:

After modeling the glasses, I decided to put them back and leave them there for a kid, then took the far more useful gloves. Considering all the poison ivy we'd been passing, that was the logical choice. I signed the log, left another bracelet (this time in blue and yellow- I feel bad leaving the same thing each time, but at least they're all different), and we trekked back to the car. Well, I stopped back at cache number 2 to get pictures of the log (I'd forgotten to do that- I like to keep them documented).

We also took a detour at those ruins we'd passed on the way down the hill to the tracks. The one side had a large building with only three walls left:

You can see the left and back wall in this photo. I'm wondering if this was a house, but I can't figure out where the fourth wall would have gone, unless someone reused that stone to make another building somewhere else.

Right across from it was a smaller stone building with four walls, but a gap in the front where I'm assuming a wooden door once stood; I'm thinking this was probably a barn of some sort:

That greenery in the middle is the gap in the stone where I think the door must have been.

You can tell this has been in ruins for a long time, judging from the tree growing right in the middle of the building:

My dad thinks that tree is at least 60-70 years old. I'm really curious about what buildings used to be here, so I'm wondering if I can find that info out somewhere. I thought it neat that sometime in the near past, someone had patched up the stone with bricks- "near past" is relative, though; this could have been a hundred years ago.

We got some pictures in front of the smaller building:

Dad


Me. You can sort of see the bricks behind us in the photos.

I thought this was kinda funny- on the way back we stepped over a power cord laying out on the trail in the middle of nowhere. What the heck is this connected to? There's nothing electrical that I could see; it must belong to the orchards, but it was out in the middle of the forest. I bet there's a family of squirrels who get cable tv. ;)


When we got back to where we'd parked we noticed that someone had pulled up behind us. When they got out of the car my dad asked "Are you geocachers?" and it turns out they were, which was cool because we'd never met other cachers before. We talked to them for a bit and they told us they'd been doing this for a few years and had over a thousand finds. Woah! I'd only just finished my sixth, lol!


Oh, and here's the swag I ended up with:

The Pathtag, the hourglass, and the gloves. :)

I'm tempted to start bringing my camera with me so I can get better photos than my cell phone takes, but I really don't want to risk damaging it. I did learn that I need to invest in a good walking stick, though; I found a useful fallen branch after snagging the last cache, but had I had one from the beginning, that would have been helpful. Now I know why my D&D character carries a quarterstaff; it doubles as a walking stick and those things are useful!

The trip ended with a stop for water ice on the way home, so definitely a fun time even if I am sore and worn out now. With all this walking I'm bound to get in shape!

Yesterday I got to go geocaching again- hooray! This time I went with both my dad (he made an account on geocaching.com as Gary87) and my fiancé (he's under my account name, but his alias in logs is JoC).

Our travels this time took us to Glen Providence Park in Media. Silly me forgot to get pictures of said park, but I did get one of the sign at the entrance:


Dad had been there earlier in the day to look for caches but only found one of the two and didn't sign the log that he did find, so he let me and Josh use the GPS and navigate to them. The first cache we looked for was THR3E Billy Goats. We got to the location quite easily, then when we climbed under the bridge (because, duh, look at the name of the cache, lol), I knew exactly where it would be. We handed Josh a stick to poke around in the spot I pointed out (he wanted to avoid snakes and things) and sure enough, out popped the tiny cache. I opened it up:


Since this was a micro (yay, we found our first micro!), I couldn't leave anything, but I did sign the log for us:

There was no room on the side of the paper where the 2010 finds were logged, so I had to use the other side. I'm assuming it's out of date because of the way the paper was folded? Ah well, it was neat getting to see all the finds from years ago on there. :D

We got some pictures of Josh, me (ugh, I look terrible in that photo- I'm not that hideous, I swear!), and dad holding the tiny cache:






We rehid this one, climbed back onto the path, and set out to find the next one, From Glen to Glen. This was a larger cache, but as we got close, the GPS started acting wonky and kept telling me it was in different directions. Luckily dad had been there earlier that day and found this one (the satellites must have liked him better earlier, lol), so he brought us to the cache. I opened it up and signed the log, then passed it off to Josh to do (what else?) a drawing of Igik and his club symbol (since JoC stands for "Jack of Clubs").


Then dad and I held the cache so I could get a picture of it:


I took a bouncy ball and left one of my handmade bracelets, then we rehid the cache and trekked back to the car. It was a long trek back- or, rather, very very much uphill, so I was too tired to be able to find the other nearby caches, so we'll get those soon. Amazingly, for all that we had to cross a stream and pass a pond, I didn't fall in. Hooray!

I'm loving geocaching and getting to hike through some gorgeous woods that I'd never been to before- that's one good thing about living in Pennsylvania: we have so many lovely parks and forests! :D And I'll admit, getting to trek through the wilderness makes me feel like my D&D characters; all I'm missing is a fox at my side. ;)

My dad bought a really awesome GPS unit (a Garmin Dakota 20), so today we braved the drizzle and mud to search for our first geocaches- there are two of them down the road from us, so we picked those first.

The first one we went after was Ode to Geoffrey, and this would have been a lot easier to find were it winter. Ye gads, all sorts of thickets and greenery (and I'm hoping I didn't get poison ivy) to search through and move around. My dad found us large sticks, so that helped us to push aside branches and things harmlessly. He was just about to give up when I finally stumbled across our target after about 45 minutes of looking, something kinda yellow hidden under- what else? rocks and leaves and branches.

I opened it up:


Though damp (like everything in the container, which was also covered in ants- fun), the log was dry enough to write in, so I signed my name and username (Taurandirath) and my dad's username, along with the date and what I took and left:

I took a poker chip and left one of my hemp bracelets (it's in a tiny baggie, so I'm hoping it won't get wet).

Amazingly I found our way back to the road (I must be a wood elf! I get lost on streets, but I can find my way out of foresty areas), and we set off to our second destination, Boo!. We searched for about 10-15 minutes (didn't want to stay long because it's right next to the main road and work traffic was starting), but couldn't find it. It's gotta be in the large rock wall, but since the wall is very very long and the GPS was acting sorta screwy (I know we were in the right location, but it was telling me we were 220 feet away), we couldn't find that one. That'll have to be for another day, preferably in the evening so we don't look so suspicious.

Overall a productive day and so much fun! I really felt like a treasure hunter or an elf, trying to locate something in the woods- I can't wait to go on more hunts with my dad. :D Next time I'm going to bring replacement baggies with me, as well as a trash bag to clean up the area; since I'm a noobie, I didn't think of that until we were already there.

You can find part one of this series here.