Adventuring Elf Sisters

Geocaching at the shore!

noreply@blogger.com (Meri Greenleaf) — Sat, 22 Jun 2013 19:20:00 +0000

My husband and I went on vacation to Wildwood/Cape May, NJ this past week. Technically this was our honeymoon since we didn't get one after we were married eight months ago. We had a great time! While we were there we did some geocaching and found five caches.

We brought the kobold plushie that I made for Josh a while ago along with us on vacation, so Whiffy went on adventures with us. I'll post some pictures here that we took while caching.

First we heading to the Cape May Lighthouse where there were three caches nearby. (Josh and I had been inside the lighthouse before, but didn't have a chance to do that this year.)

No, Whiffy, don't try to eat the lighthouse!

First we headed to the Hawk Watch where there was the first nearby cache:

Once we found it, Whiffy had to check it out:

And Josh drew our signature goblin in the logbook:

(Although I guess he should have drawn Whiffy instead!)

After that we headed down to the beach:

Then we went to find the cache located near the WWII bunker. I'd seen this from a distance many times (usually from up on top of the lighthouse) but this was the first time I ever walked up to it. (Here are a few websites of info, albeit with pictures from before more sand was added to the beach: here, here and here.)

While we were wandering the beach, we kept seeing lots and lots of bunnies!

While walking the Cape May park nature trail we also saw an otter swimming around in the pond, but unfortunately couldn't snap a picture of it. The trail was really nice, though! Very secluded and woodsy- I'd also never had a chance to visit this before, either. (Next year definitely spending more time here!) It was getting dark so we only got two pictures here:

(The lighthouse is in the background.)

We ran out of light that day, so the following evening we went to look for another cache nearby near Sunset Beach. See? Very pretty at sunset!

After we watched the sun set, we headed to the nearby WWII tower to find the cache there:

Speaking of things to do next year, I'd love to explore this more. As it was, we got chased away by evening mosquitoes before we could look around for more than the cache.

We also looked for a cache called "What is this?" that night, but it was too dark, so we couldn't find it and I couldn't get pictures. We went back the next day, but I still forgot to get pictures. There are some that other people took on the cache page, though.

The only downside of caching is that somewhere between the tower and the "What is This" cache, I lost one of the rings I was wearing. :( We backtracked, but couldn't find it.

Hoping next year to find more caches at the shore but it was fun even finding these five. :D These pictures weren't related to geocaching, but how could I not include ones taken in Wildwood?

Lots of hiking, geocaching, and tiny churches

noreply@blogger.com (Meri Greenleaf) — Sat, 11 May 2013 01:15:00 +0000

Today was another gorgeous spring day spent geocaching with my dad! My injured foot has finally gotten to the point where I can hike on it again, so today's caching took us through some trails in the woods- my favorite kind of geocaching. :)

Once again we found some pretty unique caches. Despite being in a location where you'd think this would be an easy cache, the hint was "Not a bison tube in a pine tree". Nope, it was a golf ball under the pine tree. ;)

I wish I'd gotten a picture of this one where it was: up on top of a tree branch. You tugged the piece of wood under it in this photo and it pulled the fishing line, releasing the actual cache from the tree. I'm short, so I needed my dad's help in grabbing this one, though. (That happens a lot- caches aren't always placed for short people.)

I absolutely loved this cache. The hint was "This one is for the birds!" so my dad and I both spotted this one at the same time:

This one was the black letters on the white background (turned out to be a magnet).

And this one was the last part of a pirate-themed multi. This was definitely my favorite of the day! The logbook was a map.

We also came across some neat architecture. This was what was left of a manor:

And this is the tiniest church I've ever seen. (The sweet story behind it can be found here.)

It also had a guard dog:

Along the way I made friends with a frog (toad?) and an inchworm. Here are both saying "hi":

And here are some pictures I took throughout the day.

(I love the "Please keep off tree limbs" sign. I know why it was there, though- I wanted to climb on those old, huge tree limbs!)
I'm trying to learn how to use my husband's camera, so I'm hoping to get better at photography as I go. Everything was so green and pretty that I wish I could share that!

Check out these unique caches I found this month!

noreply@blogger.com (Meri Greenleaf) — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 01:31:00 +0000

I decided to steal my husband's camera instead of using my crummy old one, so hopefully my photos will start being a bit clearer. :)

Since the weather has been so nice, my husband, dad, and I have found quite a few caches this month. I think out of the 33 I looked for, there was only one I couldn't find. (Oddly enough, that was one my dad had already found but couldn't remember the precise location to give me a hint, lol.)

We found some really interesting cache containers this month, too! I won't link to them because I don't want to give away where/what they are, but these were too fun to not share.

This one looks like a simple fireplug, right?

Nope!

This is just a bunch of wire things coming off of the electric box unit thing, right?

Actually, I fell for that one. I poked at it, thought it was something I'd either break or get electrocuted by, then started to walk away before my dad told me I was on to something with it. Sure enough, that little box thing opened:

Hey, look- an apple in a tree! Wait, that's not the right tree for an apple!

Nothing odd about a pinecone in an evergreen tree, right?

I told my dad "Hey, look, a pinecone out of season! That must be the cache!" Except, according to my dad, this type of tree doesn't grow pinecones. XD

Hey, look- piles of rocks and a stone wall!

Er... except that middle, somewhat wonky rock was the cache, as was that rectangular stone in the center of the wall. If you weren't looking, you'd never have noticed either of those as being out of place. I was especially impressed by that stone; it was hollowed out to hold a small geocache tube, but the stone was exactly the same as what the wall was made from.

This isn't the cache itself, but the cache was under this weird square thing:

And it wasn't just the caches that were awesome- I also found some fun swag! First was this adorable little sculpted birdy:

Then I found a rubber duckie. I'm slowly collecting a pile of rubber ducks that I find in caches- this is my third.

And here I am showing off my favorite swag from that particular day: snakes in the peanut brittle! (Well, mixed nuts can, but same thing.)

It's an ongoing joke that snakes in the peanut brittle keeps me occupied for hours, so I definitely had to snag this one!

And since I posted a goofy picture of me, may as well share a few others of us:

Not done with the photos yet! During the last caching trip, we got to explore around an old spring house, which was in surprisingly good shape. The roof even appeared to have been retiled recently:

Speaking of ducks, on the way back to the car I made friends with a real one:

I love finding fun caches and fun swag!

A start to the geocaching season!

noreply@blogger.com (Meri Greenleaf) — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 21:09:00 +0000

Hey, look, I'm updating this blog again! ;) I think the last real caching I did was early September and only had one quick park and grab between then and now and somehow missed blogging about any of those. Whoops! I ended up injured last year and those have finally healed/gotten strong enough that I'm able to go for walks again. Hooray! The weather was perfect (well, a bit cloudy, but it's April, what do you expect?) so that meant that it was time to go caching again. Double hooray!

First my dad and I swung by a cache that was basically a park and grab- which I could have snagged months ago had I realized it was there. It was right outside the building where I got my name changed when I was married a few months ago. Hindsight! Being terribly rusty, my dad beat me to this one- or maybe that was because he knew what we were looking for and where it probably was. :-p

Next we headed to a series of caches; these were along a long park trail in East Goshen, PA. Some were right off of it, some were in the bushes and off the beaten path. We came out about 50/50 here, both of us finding a few of the series of 9. I'll upload a few pictures of the park, but this time of year everything is still brown and dreary (the few flowers made me smile gladly, though, and I kept getting distracted by brightly colored birds- I love spring!).

A few flowers were peeking up near the bridge:

The hint on this one was "stop". Having already seen one of these signs earlier, I had a good idea of where to look. ;)

My dad signing a log:

Hooray for sweatshirt weather!

This tree-lined path looks rather bland, but inviting enough:

But turning around showed us the direction we actually had to take. Maybe in the summer this would be idyllic, but this time of year had my dad and I joking that Ringwraiths were going to follow us to the cache- or that the creepy trees would come to life!

The last stage of the cache was a larger container where we found the prettiest geocoin/travel bug that I've ever seen!

The back of it shone like stained glass in the sunlight. So pretty! I had to leave it behind, though, since I wasn't sure when I'd be able to go caching again and didn't want to sit on it.

Considering that we found 10/10 caches today, I'll consider that productive! Here's to hoping I can have another geocaching day soon! :)

Geocaching around Downingtown, meeting cows and squirrels

noreply@blogger.com (Meri Greenleaf) — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 01:50:00 +0000

For father's day I had a note in my dad's card saying "I owe you a geocaching day". Unfortunately I worked all weekend, but today he cashed in that cache day. We had a lot of fun geocaching around Downingtown, PA- and since I'd found a few of these and my dad hadn't, I was able to be his "phone a friend" of sorts. ("Ask a daughter"?)

There are some spoilers in this post if you happen to be local.

First we set out to find West Bradford Multi. It had been a long time since I'd had a chance to do a multi-stage cache and today I was also my dad's lucky rabbit's foot; he'd looked for the first stage before with no luck, but now was able to find it. We tag-teamed finding the rest and reached the final cache- this can be a rare thing with a multi, to find it all in one trip!

Here are a picture of my dad nearing the final stage and one of me along the way:

And the bits that made up the caches on this were really unique! I mean, this pen contained a log with the coordinates for the next one:

What amused me most on this one, though, was my squirrel friend: As we neared the rest area, he popped his head out of the trashcan and all I could think was him saying "Hi!! I'm a squirrel! I like cupcakes!". I was busy going "awww!" but my dad thought he was a fake (what, like a game of whack-a-mole?). The little guy darted behind the building, munching on the cupcake wrapper he'd stolen, and as I walked around he did the squirrel equivalent of "Crap! There she is again!" and darted a few fence posts over where apparently he was magically safe. I snapped a picture, he realized I was still there and did the "Eep! She's back!" before finally running away. I seem to have met a fuzzy creature with ADD- or possibly one too obsessed with cupcakes to notice that silly human was still there. ;)

We looked for a few that were essentially park and grabs, then headed for one called It's not magic. This one was also too good to not be spoiler-y! At first I didn't get what this strange cache had to do with "magic" so my dad explained. Sheesh, I felt like an idiot. (In case you couldn't tell from my crummy picture, that's a fake mushroom on top.)

Then we headed to look for a cache my fiancé and I have tried to find at least three times, Wascally Wabbit. Now I know why we couldn't find it before: the GPS on our phone had us looking 75 feet away! Traded a toy bug for a cute cow on this one:

And here are pictures to prove to said fiancé that I did find that specific cache and that I'm not making this up, I swear! I really was there! The cow did come from there!

While at Kerr Park, we looked for the one my dad hadn't found yet, Downingtown Log House. For all the times that I've been there, I'd never gotten pictures! Here we are in front of the old log house:

While caching around there, my dad kept remarking that the old stone bridges had to have been built around the 1930's- he was really close, since a sign we found said it was established in 1927!

And speaking of old stone things, how did I never notice this fountain with what appears to be a greenman bit in the center?

All in all, a great caching day! The weather was nice and had a lovely breeze and we managed to find all but one of the ones we looked for (I think I had seven finds). Once again, though, I did find that my geocaching handle is way too friggin' long: It's rare when I can fit all of "Taurandirath" onto one line!

Meet the god of birthdays and silly hats

noreply@blogger.com (Meri Greenleaf) — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 01:51:00 +0000

Long time no post! I've found a few geocaches this year, but either they were simple parking lot ones, or they were more interesting and I forgot my camera. Going to try to remember to keep the camera on me, though!

Today my dad got my attention by telling me the first thing we would be looking for would involve what looked like an ancient Greek statue. Since I'm rather obsessed with mythology and ancient Greece, this sounded like it was right up my alley! After fighting our way past a few guard geese (okay, they were just wandering the parking lot), we found the aforementioned statue. A previous cacher had named it "Concordius", Roman god of the town (Concordville, I believe), but after meeting him, I dubbed him...

Festivius, god of birthday parties and little brother of Dionysus:

WHY a statue would be in a community center complex wearing not one, but two party hats would be anyone's guess. And my guess? He's been partying too hard since his torso was no longer connected to his legs (that and missing some important body parts, of course). This is one god of parties that won't be doing any dancing anytime soon!

And here are me and my dad hanging out with him:

Now that the weather's nice, I'm planning on caching more, so look for more pictures soon! Who knows what strange thing I'll come across next time? It's almost a big number for me, too; today's caching took me to 99. Wonder if I can find an awesome one to be my 100th?

Geocaching in strange ruins

noreply@blogger.com (Meri Greenleaf) — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 18:26:00 +0000

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!

Caching around Main Street in Exton - green elf and blue warrior face burgers, foxes and rock walls

noreply@blogger.com (Meri Greenleaf) — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 21:31:00 +0000

Yesterday Josh and I decided to take advantage of the great weather and the fact that I needed to pick up some stuff at Michaels- we looked for a bunch of caches located in Exton. Art supplies acquired, we wandered around Main Street looking for the answers to the different parts of the Stroll Along Main Street cache. This was really enjoyable and a lot of fun! I really like puzzle/mystery caches. :) I didn't want to take pictures as we were walking, though, because that would have been really suspicious!

While putting together the numbers we needed for this one, we hit Main Street Cache, the only one I personally found that day. I've gotten pretty good at locating magnetic caches and spotted this one right away- after first crouching down and pretending to tie my shoes at the bus stop. ;)

Since we were right next to it, we hit Blown Circuit:

Josh spotted this one quickly (it probably helped that he was holding the GPS!) and snagged it as I poked around in all the wrong spots. Turns out I should have been trying to tie my shoes again. ;)

We took a break here to grab dinner at the convenient burger place that we'd walked past a few times; Josh and I were turning this adventure into a game of Gauntlet, so we kept saying things like "Green elf needs food badly!" and "Blue warrior has acid breath!" (he'd eaten the spicy burger, of course!), then Josh poked me in the arm and said "Green elf is It". This is why I love Josh- he's as dorky as I am. Love is quoting video games, right?

While eating (green elf did not shoot the food for once), we finished doing all the math we needed to locate the first cache. We didn't do that one right away since it would have involved backtracking, so we set off to find 1750 Zook House-Colonial Cache #2, located near a historical house next to the Exton mall. Josh says they do tours, so I'd like to see more than just peeking in the window.

And here I am outside it:

Here we struck out majorly. We poked around in the greenery where the cache is supposed to be for probably close to 45 minutes, but couldn't find it. I was getting so frustrated that I told Josh "There's too much green! We should just come back in the fall", shocking him greatly. I've never made that complaint before since green's my obsession and I love wooded areas. Someone in the logs on the site said that the hints are off, so maybe that was the problem?

Starting to run out of light, we drove over to complete "Stroll Along Main Street", which was on the same paved trail as Commerce Trail Rocks. I was really disappointed here. Apparently the cache has decoys around it, but Josh spotted the real cache so fast that I didn't even have time to poke around and find fake ones! ;)

Here I am reading the logbook paper:

And here's Josh in front of that rock wall:

And a picture of both of us since we hadn't gotten one of those yet:

We continued along the trail to the actual spot of the "Stroll Along" cache and spotted animals up ahead. At first I thought they were two cats, but as we got closer we saw that they were foxes. I love foxes! They scampered away before we could get close enough for a good picture, but you can sorta see one here:

Foxies gone, we finally reached the end of the trail and the cache. I didn't want to go in too far since there were sticker bushes and I wasn't wearing long pants (although I did pick up a hitchhiking tick at some point that day), so Josh spotted the cache while I pointed out that hollow logs are always suspicious. ;)

I adjusted this photo, but it was actually a lot darker than this by now:

We made a run for Fun at the Park, which was nearby, but couldn't beat the sunset. We have a good idea of where it is so we'll stop by in the daylight. There was an awful lot of people and kids still around at 9pm, though! But it is summer, so no wonder.

Oh, and today was the first geocaching day I was wearing my new KangaTek Sling. (I LOVE this thing! So much better than a purse for walking and caching!) This meant that my geopatch attached to it came along, too, so I was able to mark that it visited the caches. Maybe someday someone will spot me wearing it (it essentially turns me into a travel bug), but I'm just having fun logging it as visiting caches. :)

Even for some park and grabs, that's an awful lot of trees!

noreply@blogger.com (Meri Greenleaf) — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 17:22:00 +0000

My dad and I did a few easy (well, pretty easy) caches earlier this week. Most were park and grabs, but I did take a few pictures anyway. :)

First we looked for Who took my sign?, which definitely lived up to its name. ;) But it was in a LOT of weeds and bushes and I was wearing shorts, so my dad grabbed it and brought it back to the car so I could sign the log... only we couldn't because it was soaked, so we added a piece of paper. Luckily I carry one of my writing notebooks with me everywhere!

I have NO idea why this one was so wet, though, since it hung in the once-signpost upside down... Maybe someone had once opened it in a rainstorm or something? See- it's upside down from the hook:

Next we found HBTM, located just off a parking lot of a pizza place. My dad was paranoid and stayed in the car, trying to think of a way to look without being suspicious, but I realized no one was at the window of the pizza place. I darted over to where I thought it was and made a quick dash back to the car to sign it.

Aren't these things supposed to be filled in, though?

Signed the log and continued on our way:

Next up was Happy Feet, located near a dance studio. Dad found this one so quickly I was barely out of the car:

The next one I beat dad to- yay! This one was Olde Ridge Cache. While my dad got stuck in greenery he didn't have to, I found this one without getting poked by any trees. Mwahaha! He was looking under while I went in from above to snag it. Can't really tell, but there's a hole near those dead branches.

Then we headed to Twin Towers. This one apparently used to be a location with two random, strange stone towers, but alas, now only one remains. I kept calling it a "gnome house" because I had no idea what the heck it was:

And here you'll see that I made a mistake in clothing- I always wear shades of green and/or brown, which means I blend in well with trees. But not this day. No, this day I wore red. Smart, me.

(I'm also squinting at the sun like crazy. Should have just left the sunglasses on!)

And here's dad:

The next cache we hit was Gimme Shelter. Alas, my dad found this one while I stayed behind in a convenient gazebo, picking seeds and bushes out of my shoe. See all that knee-high stuff from the last cache? Yeah, that entire field worth of plant ended up in my shoes. ;)

And you know that D&D story about the Dread Gazebo? I couldn't help thinking of that, especially when I saw one of the names graffitied inside: Elan. Elan is the adorable but moronic character from Order of the Stick, so the dumb story about the gazebo reminded me of something he would say. Yeah, really random, but that's my geekiness in a nutshell. ;)

Sufficiently geeked out and now having gotten most of the plants out of my shoes, the next cache on the list was Baby Steps. Dad found this one, too- I was looking in the tree rather than by the side of the road where it was. Whoops! But hey, it was shady, and on a hot day, that was good.

We struck out on two caches, but did find the last one we looked for, Little Gunn. This one was located on a Vietnam memorial cannon- just off a parking lot of an old bank. Why a memorial would be next to a bank, I have no idea, but it was nice. :)

Fortunately it wasn't in the first place I looked (inside the cannon) because I'm an arachnophobe and that was WAY too many spider webs for me to stick my hand there. Luckily the next place I put my hand a) didn't contain any webs and b) did contain the cache.

The next day (I think?) Josh and I were out near Claddagh, a cache I couldn't find last week. This one I was ready for, though! I'd gotten hints in emails from two geocachers, and when we pulled up, the property owner was pulling out, so she gave me hints, too. We wandered over and I found it in about three seconds. Sheesh, turns out I was actually poking in the right spot last time, but my short attention span had caused me to wander away before I found it then. Took some poking around to get the cache in hand, but we did it. :)

Terrible picture, but here I am next to the farm's sign. I'm Irish, so I liked an Irish-themed cache:

And I had to document the log because I got a cache without my dad signing it, too. ;) It's hard to see, but my name is the green one on the end:

Caching near Hobbiton with an Irish faux fox (err.. something like that, anyway!)

noreply@blogger.com (Meri Greenleaf) — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 03:49:00 +0000

Nice weather again this week meant a bunch of caching. Yay! Friday I went geocaching with my dad and Saturday was a quick trip out with my fiance- and my dad surprised me this week with an early birthday present. A paid premium account for geocaching.com. Yay, upgrade! :D

First up, my dad set out to find the first half of Hidden Trails, a cache near our house. While walking to the first half, I remarked to my dad that the overgrown back road reminded me of the road in Hobbiton where they first meet the ringwraiths and Pippin finds mushrooms. Yeah, I'm a dork. ;)

My GPS was WAY off and was telling me to go far beyond the hint given on the cache page, so the hint actually served me better than the GPS. Wasn't up to trekking to the next part of the cache because my asthma was bothering me too much to walk far, so I'll get the second half later.

Next we headed off for some easier ones- I say "easier" because the terrain was simpler, but we only found one. LOL! First was one outside a church we've driven past a gazillion times, Holy Sh??. Here's the church:

My dad found this cache so quickly I barely had time to get out of the car. lol!

Feeling lucky, we tried the next one, Sleeping at the Beech, a micro in an old cemetery. Here our luck failed. My dad had found this one a while ago, but couldn't remember exactly where it was. We both poked around the large tree for a while, climbing up on it to look around, but came out empty handed. I hope the storm this week didn't dislodge it!

But hey, at least the tree was neat!

Finally giving up, we headed to the next one, Claddagh. This one appealed to me because I'm Irish and know about Claddaghs (I just gave my claddagh ring to my sister last week, oddly enough!), but despite being Irish, my dad and I couldn't find this one either. I've since got some hints, so I'll use those to look next week- I'll get pictures then, too.

We then struck out again with garratt mill park. The coordinates we had were off but forgot to put the new ones in our GPSs. My dad had found this one months ago, too, but it was so overgrown this time of year that he had no idea where it was. So we'll look for this in the fall.

Next up we did actually have some luck! Dad had found these Campus NSQ caches earlier, too, but tagged along while I did them. And they involved my most hated nemesis- math! I finally got the coordinates calculated right, though, and found both of these caches and the bonus. Here I am avoiding the sudden burst of rain near the first part:

This was an office complex, but had once been a school and dormitory for girls in the last century, so there were lots of old buildings. Here's one of them:

Driving past, we saw a really neat thing- a fox decoy, I'm assuming to keep birds away. I love foxes, so I took a picture:

The third part of the cache involved a lot more bushwhacking- here's a view near the cache:

Here I dropped off the geogem travel bug I'd picked up last week and my dad also dropped off a travel bug, too (his was a pirate).

I really loved the cache log. Monkey in a hat!

Bonus cache found, we called it a day because I had to head over to my best friend's house for dinner and geeky gaming.

Saturday Josh and I didn't have great luck, either. First we set off to find Don't Take The Speaker!, a cache we'd already looked for twice. Turns out we were making it WAY harder than we had to, and I spotted it in about fifteen seconds. LOL!

Here I am squinting at the sun near the cache location- and I'm holding the cache, although you can't see that in the picture:

And here's the cache log:

Happy to finally find one we hadn't before, we set off to try to locate Ye Ol Watering Hole. Again. This one totally needs to be a 5 difficulty, not 4! ;) Josh was getting frustrated by the fact that the GPS app on his phone kept bouncing him all over the place, so we gave up again. Someday we'll find it!

We struck out once again with the third cache we looked for, NY Giants. This was in a park and after walking very very much uphill, we found the spot where the cache was... but gave up. I logged this as a "did not find", but it was more of a "did not want to go into the underbrush wearing shorts while being swarmed by bugs"; in other words, we chickened out and decided it would be better to look for in the fall- or at least when equipped with long pants and bug spray.

So lots of geocaching fun times! Hopefully my asthma will calm back down so I can do more hiking ones, but I'm just glad to knock one long-time "did not find" off my list!

(Not so) Grim geocaching adventures with a bouncy horse

noreply@blogger.com (Meri Greenleaf) — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 17:38:00 +0000

Yesterday was another gorgeous day of geocaching in woodsy Pennsylvania with my dad. :) We looked for five caches and I snagged them all- a good day. I think dad had found all of these, but he tags along with me so I can find them, too.

First we hit a playground for Playtime:

After trying to figure out what the funnel things were on the jungle gym thing and agreeing with my dad that they were something from Dr Suess (later I realized they were things you could talk into, but I like our idea better), I located the cache. Er... after ending up with a pound of woodchips in my hair. Note to self: pull hair back when near the ground.

And then it was playtime- after signing the cache log, I jumped on yet another bouncy animal, this time a horse:

Dad asked why I didn't pick the duck again; I said I wanted a change. ;) Luckily there was no one around because it meant no one got suspicious of me poking around- or wondering why a grown woman was sitting on a bouncy horse. LOL!

Next up we headed into the woods for Stream to Screen. This was one located at a gauging station next to a creek. My camera decided to make this picture be very green:

I have to say, this is the most... er... vertical cache I'd located so far (a status that didn't last long because we found two on top of cliffs later that day, lol). While climbing up this one, I had to joke-grumble about the cacher before me being tall- or at least taller than me. I really had to stretch!

I thought this one was neat because my dad was actually the first to find earlier this week and I was #6:

Next up we crossed the street and headed for three caches that were in the same general area; these were all near an old railroad track, a future Rails to Trails:

First up was A Grim Adventure. Yup, this one was themed on "The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy", so of course I insisted on quoting that show as we hiked to the cache. Alas, my dad hasn't seen it, so my speaking in a Jamaican accent just confused him. Oddly enough, I was going to wear a shirt with Grim on it without realizing what caches we were hitting, but decided at the last minute not to. Double alas!

I braved sticker bushes, poison ivy and spiderwebs (spiders are definitely the worst of the bunch!) and got to a spot that looked rather suspicious. And yup, there was the cache, in it's Grim-ly glory (hope it's okay to share cache pictures- this one was just so cool! And apt!).

After I signed the log, we headed off to the next one nearby, The Edge is Never Dull. Great cache location with a great view- I was kind of wishing it was winter, though, because so much greenery meant I couldn't really see down to the creek. But since I wouldn't want to be caching in winter, I'll take the greenery. ;)

I'm going to assume this was painted to look like a face? Anyway, I practiced my climbing skills and located the cache, then climbed the rest of the way to the top:

Unfortunately my camera didn't really show how high up I was; dad was pretty far below:

We continued on, but near the cache I spotted the word "Art" graffitied on the rock. Since I'm an artist, I had to pose for a picture:

Picture taken, we headed for the last cache, Rails and Trails 2. We joked that this one you needed to be half-goat to get to because it was even higher up than the last one. But we made it up! (Yay, I'm in better shape than I thought I was!) Something caught my eye, and I wandered towards it without realizing that this geocache had a hint. ;)

I found the cache and went "Ooo!" or rather "Yarrr!" when I saw what was inside:

That ruby gem is a travel bug! How cool is that! I signed the log and grabbed it, and will try to drop it off at a different cache this weekend.

Dad and I headed back down the mountain (why did I not get a picture of that? Oh, right, I was too busy sliding down on my butt on the slippery dead leaves, lol!), and wandered over to check out a bridge. Or what was left of one, anyway:

At this point I was all sorts of worn out, so we called it a day. But it was a lot of fun! I love getting to hike in the woods- what can I say, I'm an elf-girl. ;)

A June day with eight caches (and a bouncy duck!)

noreply@blogger.com (Meri Greenleaf) — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 15:31:00 +0000

Yesterday's weather was gorgeous- after two months of rain and cold weather and a week of sweltering August weather, we had a gorgeous June day with clear skies and a wonderful breeze. So of course my dad and I went geocaching! I took tons of pictures because the greenery combined with the bright blue skies was so pretty, but I had my crappy old camera and most of the pictures didn't turn out. :( I have a nicer camera, but it's the one I use for my business, so I'm afraid to take it somewhere it could be dropped. Maybe I should, though, because then you can see just how gorgeous Pennsylvania is! Still, you can click the pictures to view them larger.

Anyway, today our trek took us through Lenni and Concord Township and down into Delaware. First we hit Two Creeks Make One. This was a nice sandy beach and creek- dad wants to bring the dogs here. :)

And here's dad signing the log. He spotted this one much quicker than I did, then let me look for it. I was getting frustrated so he kinda told me which direction to face, which helped because I was able to snatch it from its hiding place then. ;)

Our first cache of the day found, we set off to find J&J 4 THE KIDS. And here is where my camera decided it wanted to be stupid and not give me clear photos. *grumble grumble*

Here's the best picture I got of the location:

This one had all sorts of swag in it (which was the point- it's a kid-friendly cache), so I picked up a tiny toy frog (I love frogs!) and left a toy car behind. And here I found a travel bug: Joel's Empire Penguin

Oddly enough, there was another penguin in this cache, too! But this travel bug wanted to come with me for a bit, so I carried him to a few more caches until I found one dry (and large) enough to leave him. Here he is saying goodbye to that cache:

Here's another view as we headed back out of the woods:

And we passed some really pretty flowers along the path, too:

(And now I'm baffled- why do some photos come out crystal clear and some utterly blurry? I'm taking them on the same settings...)

Penguin acquired, we set off to the next cache, Park and Recreation Cache. Dad told me that the tree stump where I was looking had been the location of this cache- back when it had been a tree before it got hit by lightning. LOL! I was in the right spot, just a year behind. So I started looking in other spots and came up with it. Hooray!

You can see the stump here. Isn't the sky so pretty? :D

Here I snagged a six-sided die that was in the cache. I was going to put an eraser in it to swap, but the log was really damp so I was afraid anything in the cache with the log would mean it would seal even less tightly. I figured since it was a micro, this was for the best.

Next we headed to a nearby dog park to look for Luna's Cache. Pulling in I saw the oddest thing- Mount Doom!

There was a pile of... well, stuff outside a barn and in that pile was a volcano. Or at least the front of a volcano, looking like a stage prop. Who randomly keeps a volcano outside, though? LOL!

We'll definitely have to bring the pooches to this dog part because there are some really nice fenced in places for small dogs and big dogs to keep them separate. This used to be some sort of horse ranch thing because there were at least six stables and a bunch of large, fenced areas. Only the two for the dogs were kept up, though.

Here's dad looking at the one stable:

And a slightly better view:

And here's the stable area that was turned into the dog park:

Right, we were looking for a cache, weren't we? ;) Sorry, dad and I always get distracted by architecture and stuff like that. Here's the cache:

I was amused because the squeaky toy in there matched my pants.

Cache log signed and stables poked at, we headed on to the next: Clayton Pipe Refit. This was a multi that my dad had searched for for an entire year, finally completing it last month. With his help (mostly on the 2nd part because I didn't want to be out in the direct sun too long), I found it in one day. ;)

Here's the view near the first part of the cache:

From here he found the coordinates to go to the second part. And this is what I love about Pennsylvania and why I never want to leave the state and live somewhere else. The greenery. I know other states have trees, too, but these are my trees. As an elf-girl, that fact is important. ;)

Here's a creek we passed on the way to part 2:

And here's a view looking back towards part 2:
(Part 2 was just off that golf course and baseball field.)

On to part 3 to find the cache!

I'm currently writing a centaur as a main character for a story and all I could hear was his voice in my head saying how much he loved a grassy field on the edge of a forest with the bright blue sky above. :)

Once we reached the coordinates, the cache was an easy find. I signed the log and dad snapped a picture of me in the woods near it:

I was going to leave the penguin here since the cache was large enough, but it was also rather damp, so he stayed in my purse for a bit longer.

Next we hit a park-and-grab kind of cache located just off a ballpark. Luckily on a weekday early afternoon, no one was there. ;) This one was Tanks for the Park @ BCP!, a micro, so nothing really to say about this one other than another good cache on a gorgeous day. :)

Following this was another park and grab one (HSG), this time outside a shopping center in Delaware (our GPSs didn't extend maps past PA so we joked that we were driving off the edge of the world or in the "here be dragons" spot on a map). My dad snuck around the fence and found it first, but he let me find it, too. :)

Then onto another woodsy trek! Yay! This one was a mystery one called Happy Jack. The coordinates only led us to the parking lot... where I was convinced Batman lived:

(Okay, these boxes were all over the place, as I later learned. Must be a lot of bats!)

We passed what appeared to be a kid's drawing of Medusa:

Now on the lookout for super heroes and gorgons, we also had to locate Happy Jack, who we knew to be a tree stump.

But we found him peeking around a turn in the trail:

And posed for a photoshoot:

Happy Jack faced the coordinates of the cache, so after locating those and entering them into our GPSs, we located the actual cache, where I dropped off the penguin travel bug. :)

On the way out I just had to play on the bouncy animals we'd seen in the way in since now there were no kids around. I picked the duck over the frog or the squirrel. ;)

Whew! Really long post, but it was an equally long day! I think we ended up caching for five hours. It was a lot of fun!

A day of bizarre finds- a wild recliner and a drunk tree

noreply@blogger.com (Meri Greenleaf) — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 02:46:00 +0000

Yay, the warm weather is finally sticking around! Today my dad and I found three caches- whoot! All were in the wooded area around an industrial park. (Sounds weird, but this is PA. We have LOTS of trees, hence why my caching name means "Forest Wanderers".)

The first one we looked for was MPI #4. Didn't get any pictures around this cache because I was too busy avoiding sticker bushes, poison ivy and pulling ticks off my arm. Sheesh, and here I was thinking this early in the spring I'd be safe from those, but no dice. Even just the quick trek to the cache found me a tiny tick hitching a ride. Hmph.

However, there was dice- well, one die, anyway. Picked that up from inside the cache since I'm a tabletop gamer and always find myself needing dice. ;) Left a skull ring I'd had in my purse since last Halloween:

Happily acquiring one of my favorite things, we set off to the next cache just down the road: MPI #11. I made this one FAR too difficult and joked once again about the Brandybuck direction sense and how I was bound to get us eaten by Old Man Willow. (Not too far from the truth; got stuck in a tree when it decided to eat my hair.) Turns out the cache was near the edge of the woods. Whoops?

I blame being distracted on the fact that we kept finding bits of what appeared to be green sheep:

Eventually we located the source: a rare and dangerous rogue recliner in its natural habitat, lounging near the cache with its stuffing sticking out.

WHO dumps a large chair in the middle of the woods? I mean, really? Hmph. Anyway, this mystery solved, I soon spotted the cache near some of the misplaced chair-stuffing that an animal had kindly left, possibly as a trade for swag. Who knew squirrels could geocache? ;)

We also located a cinder block with rocks perched neatly on it. Apparently the squirrels had also been using it as a table and were playing a kind of bizarre game of rock-chess:

This cache was amazingly dry, so I left the last of my hemp bracelets (will make more this week!) and took a bouncy ball. Because of caching, I not only have a new stash of dice, I also am collecting rubber duckies and bouncy balls. ;)

Bouncy ball in hand (well, in purse), we headed off to the last find of the day, Good All Gone. This one I wisely approached with a poking stick in hand, as it looked like the prime location for a snake or something that would decide an elf girl would make good dinner. Luckily the cache location was empty of wildlife. Whew!

The picture's not so great, but here's the HUGE fallen tree near the cache:

While we were climbing back up the hill, took a picture of me:

(Can't really see, but I'm wearing my "I work knights" renfaire shirt. Me, geeky?)

And snuck one of dad:

If you ever wonder why he goes by Yosemite1, look at that mustache. ;)

And on the way out I noticed one more amusingly misplaced thing- a drunk tree:

Yup, that's a tree drinking from a glass bottle. I would have removed it, but couldn't really get to it from where I was, so dad said to leave it.

So a fun day in good weather! On the way home, we also looked for another cache we have yet to find, but fourth time wasn't the charm. Someday we'll find it! We stopped for water ice on the way back, so that made up for the one "did not find" of the day. ;)

--------------------------

And I just realized I never blogged about the caches Josh and I found a month ago- but it was so long ago that I can't remember the details, so I'll just share the picture I took of Josh while looking for a cache last month:

It's an incredibly goofy picture but do you want to know why I shared? (Other than blackmail, I suppose...) Josh looks so much like Igik, the goblin he draws on our logs entries. Look, it's the same face! It would probably be more offensive for a fiancee to say this if said fiancee didn't have a thing for monster humanoids. LOL!

Nice weather means more caching! Yay!

noreply@blogger.com (Meri Greenleaf) — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 14:41:00 +0000

Finally got some daytime caching in- and that means pictures! This past weekend my fiancé Josh (he signs logs as JoC) and I decided to test out the GPS feature on his new fancy phone; I think it was called GeoBeagle and it seemed to work pretty well since we found six out of the seven we looked for. :)

Since it was a gorgeous day (finally been warm enough to cache!), on Saturday we decided to head to a local park near Josh's house to find the two located there. First we searched for Broad Run Park. Since this was our first time using that GPS, we had some difficulty at first. I thought I was where the cache would be, but couldn't find it, so wandered away with the GPS to test the accuracy and see what kind of numbers I could narrow it down to.

Unfortunately, while I was wandering away and spinning in circles, Josh located the cache. Exactly where I'd been looking, but I was too short to see it. Bah, tall people, getting all the luck. ;)

Here he is hamming it up while he riffled through the cache:

As you can see from the view near the cache, early March in Pennsylvania is still pretty ... brown. Things aren't blooming yet:

And as you can notice from the logbook, not a lot of caching going on in the winter:

And since Josh was with me this weekend, "Taurandirath" got a drawing of his signature goblin next to it. Say hi to Igik!

After pausing to take a picture:

We headed onto the next cache in the park, Stumped On The Run. We hunted around for this and once again Josh made the find:

While signing the log, a lady walking a dog said "Hey, are you guys geocaching? I think my husband's found that one", which was neat! I'm always afraid we look suspicious while caching, so I'm happy when we come across non-muggles. ;)

After strolling back to the car, passing more people with dogs (gotta have my dad stop by this park to cache- we have two dogs who'd love the trip!), we headed off to find some park and grab caches.

I'm not entirely sure if this order is correct, but I think first we found Wile E. Coyote Can Do It in Less Than 30 Minutes.

I snagged this one with some help from a dude working at the nearby store (who was taller than me; this is not a day to be short, as the cache was pretty high up)- he knew exactly where it was, and, judging from other comments on that geocaching page, has helped others find it. Yay, helpful people! :D Josh had taken a phone call right as we got out of the car, so that was tying up the GPS anyway. Even though I had help, I considered this a find for me and my only one of the day. Darn Josh, being so good at this! ;)

Here's the view at the cache:

Lots of geese were milling around, wading around in the flooded ground (we'd gotten a lot of rain recently).

I mention all that rain because the next cache? Well, we pretty much had to cross a swamp to get to Caln School House Cache. I should have gotten better pictures because these two don't even begin to describe the mud and sand we had to cross to get over to the cache:

This time I was distracted by a phone call (not that I minded- it was my best friend saying she was coming over that evening) and Josh snagged it. The location of this one surprised me when he pointed it out- I was expecting it to be ... well, not where it was. This wasn't technically a park and grab, but it wasn't a lot of walking, either. Or, rather, it wouldn't have been a lot of walking if we'd been able to take the direct route, which would have involved swimming through a temporary swamp.

Oh! And when we pulled up in the parking lot, we saw someone come walking out of the direction of the cache. We'd assumed he must have been looking for it (not much other reason to be out that way in the mud!), but when we got to the log the last visit was a month ago, so either he didn't want to cross the mud and gave up or wasn't actually a cacher. Who knows?

After acquiring more mud (I was beginning to feel like Pigpen), we headed off to the next cache across the street, Go Sit in the Corner - Again!

I have no idea what this had to do with a corner since it was in a tree, but Josh put my elf-ness to shame and found it before I could:

What can I say, the boy was on a roll. I honestly have no idea how he found this itty one so quickly:

Hoping that we were going to be lucky, and having a bit more time before our friends would arrive at Josh's house, we tried to find one more: Don't Take The Speaker!

And here's where our luck failed. Twice. We came back on Sunday to find this and still couldn't, so I have no idea where this one is. Arg. We'll find it at some point! Not sure how it's had 65 finds and only one other DNF. Alas, we are baffled.

On Sunday we also searched for another cache (Trackside near Thorndale) and- tada!- found that one. Or, rather, I finally found one. Yay! I seem to be good at finding shiny green things in trees; I'd found another one like this recently, too.

Honestly, though, if it hadn't been for the sun glinting through the trees reflecting off the cache, I don't think I would have found this nearly as easily. Still, I would have kept looking because we wouldn't have caught the eye of anyone; it was the parking lot of a train station and since it was a Sunday there weren't any cars in the parking lot- and we were sheltered by the pine trees anyway. :)

Although I am realizing that "Taurandirath" was probably a poor choice in name:

It's so long that it's sometimes longer than the logbooks, and forget writing in "Meri and JoC" with it at times like that. And have I mentioned that I'm rather dyslexic? Yeah, half the time I spend too long muttering the letters trying to figure out the order they go in. Ah, Elvish, making things complicated. ;)

Edit: Eep, and forgot to post the picture of me and Josh caching Sunday- I'm using that as our profile picture on geocaching.com now. :)

So all in all a great caching weekend! Fingers crossed I'm up to going again this weekend and the weather holds out. :D

A day of park and grab caching

noreply@blogger.com (Meri Greenleaf) — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 03:35:00 +0000

Since the weather has gotten nicer (meaning it's still cold, but at least the snow's mostly gone), my dad and I decided to try caching again today, with some luck. We managed to find 3 out of the 6 park and grabs (parking lot and easy terrain caches) we looked for. Unfortunately, since it's still winter that means it gets dark stupid early, so I wasn't able to get many pictures. Sorry about that!

First we hit A giant cache, located in the parking lot of a Giant. Obviously. No luck here- both of our GPSs were bouncing us all over the place. I finally got mine to settle down, but it told me the cache was in the middle of the parking lot. The middle- where the cars turn in. Umm... no. It's obviously on one of the grassy islands where cachers won't become pancakes, but we couldn't figure out which, so we'll have to come back later.

Next stop- Play Ball or Die. I really liked this one, but it was too dark to get a picture- dark enough that I told dad "There's no way we'll be able to find this". He turned to walk back to the car for a flashlight when I said "Wait, no, there it is!". Yup, I found a tiny, well-hidden green cache in a tree. What can I say, my Elf-instincts must have kicked in. That and the cache was shiny and my favorite color. ;)

1 for 2, we headed to the next cache: Phobia #5. This is one we'd looked for back in September, but couldn't find. This time around we still couldn't find it. I emailed the cache owner for another hint, so maybe next time!

Now 1 out of 3- not very good odds- we drove off to the next one: The Coop's Warning. Which meant another tree- and not just any tree. A sign-eating tree! Really!

I wish I'd gotten a better picture, but the metal pole of the sign? It was inside the tree! If it'll let me link directly to an image on geocaching.com, you can see a much better picture taken during the daytime here.

Onwards to the next one! Feeling better at 2 finds to 2 nots, we headed to Got Pizza?. I'm really glad I went with dad on this one because he wanted to look on completely the wrong side of the row of stores. I pointed out that the parking lot probably went behind them because the GPS was telling me it was about 600 feet away (and pointing towards the buildings), and sure enough, we were able to drive behind them. We poked around a lamppost (think it was a lamppost, anyway) and I felt something stick to my glove. Pulling it out, I found the cache now velcroed to my hand. (Note to self: if I wear gloves, I attract caches. Probably not a helpful note come summer, though.)
Got a picture of this one, although it's blurry:

Or maybe I just attract green things? ;) Still not sure why this had velcro on it in the first place...

Feeling quite proud of ourselves at finding 3 out of 5 caches, dad and I decided to try our luck and look for What was it? again. You know, the weird building Plurkfish and I visited in October. Alas, this time we still couldn't find it. *grumble grumble* People have found it since we last looked, but in that time it was found wedged in the mud, so I'm wondering if it got knocked loose again. Dad and I poked everywhere. Sigh, guess we'll just have to keep looking for this one!

Final score for the day: 3 finds, 3 did not finds. Well, at least we found some. :)

Winter isn't the best time for caching, I guess

noreply@blogger.com (Meri Greenleaf) — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 18:08:00 +0000

Finally had a chance to go geocaching again when the weather turned slightly warmer than it has been. But caching in PA in February? Not particularly easy. Still we set off to find Walk the Plank, a cache near the blacksmith shop and plank house in the historic village of Goshenville.

After a lot of "Arrrr!" and "Avast!" and "Where'd I put my pirate hat?" (didn't actually wear it, but wondered anyway), my dad and I set off. The weather may have been warmer, but there was still a good 5-8" of snow where we were walking.

The area was wetlands with a boardwalk. Not that you can really tell that in the snow:

I'm pretty sure we found the correct coordinates (this being a puzzle cache), but after searching for ... geez, a while, we came up empty handed. Alas! I'm hoping that all the snow and ice we've had recently didn't dislodge the cache container, but for all I know, it was still buried under all the snow. I think my dad said he was going to ask the cache owner for a hint.

Still, this was a really neat location (I love old buildings!) so I definitely want to come back when the weather is warmer to get better pictures. So I guess it's not entirely bad that we couldn't find the cache. ;)

Here's the blacksmith shop:

And here's the plank house:

There's also apparently a letterbox nearby- Dad and I have been meaning to start letterboxing, so maybe we'll hit that next time, too. :)

Caching around the Hospital

noreply@blogger.com (Live, Love, Laugh, Write!) — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 23:23:00 +0000

I tried to go on a geocaching adventure earlier this week - but it didn't turn out so well. I've since found out the I was looking in totally the wrong spot (long story) but hey, at least I got some pictures!

Caching around Swarthmore College

noreply@blogger.com (Meri Greenleaf) — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 17:50:00 +0000

Oops, forgot to blog this earlier this week. My dad (Yosemite1) and I went caching around the Swarthmore College campus on Friday- this was one of those times were I'm incredibly not suspicious looking. I mean, a girl in her 20's carrying a schoolbag? Yup, fit right in. My dad joked that there aren't a lot of college students with huge Yosemite Sam mustaches, though, so he was a bit out of place. ;)

The first cache we hit was called Horton and the Tree Swing. This was a nice easy find without much walking- just the kind of thing I need. :) The reason for the name? The cache was in a bush/tree that looked rather elephant-shaped. Silly me forgot to get a picture of it, though.

Here's what the inside of the cache container looked like:

The logbook was full, so someone had added a new piece of paper to sign.

After this we headed to the other cache of the day- Shhh!...It's a secret! This one I really liked- not only was the cache hidden around my very favorite plant:

English ivy! :D (Yup, that's the cache hidden in there.)

The theme was actually "Cornus Florida" ("Flowering Dogwood"), but after poking around said type of tree:

(And yes, I got a kick out of the fact that EVERY plant seemed to have a nametag. It must be some sort of study for the school, but it made me laugh anyway. "Hi, my name is Flowering Dogwood, but you can call me 'Cornus'.")

I got distracted by all the ivy and went to poke someplace else. Which was dumb because I had been poking right next to where the cache was. Thank goodness dad was there to find it. lol! (He actually was suspicious that he was in the right place because he found a sharpie lying on the ground. Not a lot of sharpies in the middle of a wooded area, normally. Marker trees aren't too common around here.) ;)

We signed the log and headed to what we'd seen coming over to the cache- the Whisper Bench:

Yeah, it just looks like a stone bench, but when you sit on it, it's like the person across from you is talking into a microphone or something. We didn't try whispering, but dad was talking to me normally from across the seat and his voice was really loud and clear. It was neat!

I forgot to get a picture of the really nice inscription on the bench, but I got a picture of the sign next to it:

And dad and I got some pictures of us on the bench, of course. Here's dad:

And here's me:

Why yes, I am wearing a kitty hat. This was the first time I had to wear a coat caching since our first adventure in May- can't say that I'm a fan of being outdoors in the cold, as much as I love geocaching. (How the heck did I ever manage to get used to going to college on a mountain, anyway? I hate the cold.)

I'm hoping for some warmish nice days this winter so that dad and I can find some of the ones that were too overgrown for him to find in the summer. :)

Adventuring with the Plurfish at the Renfaire

noreply@blogger.com (Meri Greenleaf) — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 16:17:00 +0000

Yesterday the Plurkfish and I went on another adventure- to the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire. I didn't get as many pictures as I would have liked because I felt silly carrying around a fish without my best friend there (she couldn't get off work that day), and my fiancé flat out refused to be in a picture with a fish.

Still, I did get pictures! Josh snapped one of me and Plurkfish outside my favorite shop at the faire- the bead shop. ;)

This is a terrible picture of me, so I resized it small. But hey, that's my elf costume I just finished on Saturday- my very first sewn things (a tunic and cloak). I'm really proud of how well they came out! This is just the first incarnation of the costume, though- I'd like to add bits of leather and fur to it and make a longbow and quiver (saw some patrons at the faire with archery gear and I was jealous!), and eventually get/make some leather armor.

Anyway, onto more pictures! I was so embarrassed to ask "Hey, could I get a picture of you holding my fish?" but luckily Don Juan and Miguel are great guys and went along with it. I tried to explain that the fish is traveling the world, but I was so shy that I'm not sure how clear I was. Heh.

Here's Don Juan with the fish:

I love that Miguel is in the background. LOL!

And speaking of, here's Miguel:

I'm really really hoping I remembered to thank them. I was so embarrassed about asking this that I'm afraid I came off as rude. So consider this a heartfelt thank you in case I did forget- they made this shy elf-girl's day. :D

Those were the only pictures I got of the fish that day, but here are a few more from the faire. The first show we saw that day was the Duo of Woo; I'd seen this show years ago, but I don't think they were at our faire for a few years. We sat too far back to get good pictures, but I did get two:

I found videos on Youtube of what they were doing in those pictures: the first you can watch here and the second was part of their Olympics.

After this show we saw Don Juan and Miguel- I got a lot more pictures of them since we had better seats.
Here's Don Juan having a whip contest with Esmeralda:

(I find it so cool that his daughter is part of their act.)

Here's Don Juan using Miguel as target practice:

Here's Miguel as the queen of Spain:

And a French guy:

And a pirate:

Here's Don Juan and Esmeralda (as a pirate) sword fighting:

I took more pictures, but that's probably enough to share. I love this act!

The last show we saw of the day was the human chess match. I only got two pictures of this, though, and it was before it started. Here's the queen:

And here's a less zoomed in picture of her court presiding over the match:

Me and the Plurkfish had a lot of fun yesterday, to say the least!

Geeky adventures with the Plurkfish

noreply@blogger.com (Meri Greenleaf) — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 17:06:00 +0000

I'm crossposting this to my regular blog, so you can find that here, too.

The Plurkfish is a small fabric fish who is swimming (well, via the post office) from place to place visiting the artists on Plurk.com; if you don't know what that is, Plurk is a social networking site like Twitter, only better (and sideways).

I was lucky enough to get a visit from the fish this week, so he's been spending the weekend having adventures and getting into mischief with me. ;) The first thing we did was go geocaching; these were just simple park-and-grab ones, but the Plurkfish enjoyed himself immensely. It turns out he's also a good luck charm!

The first cache we hit was called The Dangler, which my dad spotted right away. The Plurkfish got all nosy and wanted to see what we were doing:

But he was so nosy that I forgot to sign his name in the logs. Whoops!

He liked the caches we found that day because they were all his size. No, Plurkfish, a cache container isn't fish food:

"Where are we going next?" the fish wondered.

"Are we there yet?"

I couldn't get a picture at the next two caches without looking suspicious (we were in the middle of a parking lot), so we snuck the cache container into the car- I'm not sure if this was the 2nd or 3rd since both containers were identical (Bull's Eye and Bull's Eye - Again!).

And what's this inside the 2nd cache? Wow, Plurkfish, you really are lucky! It's a pair of dice! Green ones! (This is especially funny because my elf-sister said before we left to cache that I needed to tape dice to the fish for geeky game night later. She's psychic!)

I didn't have anything small enough to trade, so I left money in the cache pretty much equal to the price of dice. As someone who buys dice on a regular basis, I figured this was a fair trade. (I also switched out the baggie in the cache because the old one was too big.)

Then we were on to the second Bull's Eye cache, which was booby trapped with a fold up magic wand (it was like snakes in the peanut brittle- my very favorite prank- so this made me laugh!). After the wand popped out, Plurkfish wanted to try being a wizard for a while:

We reset the wand so that it would pop out for the next unsuspecting cacher... although if a muggle ever found this one and opened it, I'd love to see what happened when they were hit by a spring-loaded wand. Mwahaha! All caches should have something like this to keep the clueless away. ;)

Then off to the last cache of the day, What was it?, which neither dad, the fish, nor I can figure out the purpose of. A guardhouse, maybe?

Alas, here Plurkfish's luck ran out- we couldn't find it. It was too muddy to really look around, so dad and I will have to go back another day. The fish did have fun exploring inside, though! Me, I was creeped out by the spiders that kept escaping from the leaves inside as I poked around. *shudders*

Since it was getting dark and my friends were expecting us, I traded dad for my fiancé, and Josh and I went to hang out with my best friend Care (she's a Plurkie, too!), her guy, and her mom. I'd never met Jason before so I'm quite pleased that he got to meet both me and a fish at the same time. Hey, never claimed to be normal. ;) Here they are with Plurkfish:

Thanks for humoring me, guys. Now onto gaming! We played Munchkin and since I won two out of three games, the fish's luck was continuing.

I tried to convince the other players that Plurkfish should serve as a Henchman card and give me extra hands to hold items, but that didn't work. Probably because a fish has no hands. Heh.

That lack of hands didn't stop him from joining in a fight, though! Here he is trying to steal my fiancé's sword; bet you didn't know fish could sword fight. (Even ones who aren't swordfish, it turns out.)

I wanted to join in, but I'd left my foam mace at home. Alas! Ah well, at least the fish got to join the melee. ;)

And before we left, we got a picture of me and Care and the fish:

Darnit, sis, don't wear those boots- I like being taller than you. :-p

And that's all the adventure from Friday. I'm planning on taking the Plurkfish with me to the renfaire on Sunday (assuming I'm feeling okay), so hopefully more pictures will come soon! I'll get pictures of Josh with the fish then since I forgot to do that yesterday.

Time for some evening caching

noreply@blogger.com (Meri Greenleaf) — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 01:51:00 +0000

My dad and I went geocaching today, but since it's the end of summer, it got dark long before we were done. Because of that, some of my photos had to be heavily edited so they show up- sorry about that!

Today the first cache we hit was Leiper Railway Cache in Leiper Park in Nether Providence, PA.
Since the park had a sign, I took a picture:

The gps was acting wonky because the cache was under a bridge/overpass, but I was able to figure out where it was despite the "help" of the gps. ;) I took a kitty-shaped silly band and left one of my bracelets (note to self: make more of these- I'm down to one left).
Here's the cache:

The next cache (Psycho Suburban Cache #1: Abandoned Springhouse) wasn't one we originally intended to find; my dad just wanted to show me the place because he knows how much I love old buildings (even if they are just in ruins) and it was right down the road from the Leiper Railway cache.

We climbed all over it so that I could get fun photos.
The view from the road of the outside of the springhouse:

The inside of the springhouse- the wall to the left is the other side of the one that's next to the street:

Here we started climbing up above the building- that's an above view of the "inside" of the building:

Then we climbed slightly higher...

And dad says "Hey, what's the square part over there? That looks suspicious." (You can't really see it here, but just below the car is the rectangular part he was referring to.)

We walked (well, climbed) back around the building to get to the front and dad headed in the direction that we'd seen from above. While he was climbing around inside (I wasn't about to- it was way too muddy and full of dangerous-looking bushes and I was wearing shorts), I made friends with a few bumblebees living in the bushes on the outside wall, but you can't see them in the photo (well, sorta- there's a blurry flower in the center where I think one was).

Dad finally reached the spot where he thought the cache to be, and after designating me flashlight girl so I could retrieve it from the car (good thing I didn't go in there!), descended into the square building bit:

Sure enough, he found the right spot- in a pile of cinder blocks (why the heck were cinder blocks in an old springhouse, anyway?) he found the cache. Here's the inside of that square building bit thing and that hole in the ceiling is where he climbed down:

He climbed back out so I could sign the log, too (hey, I was right there- I just wasn't up to a downward climb onto cinder blocks), and I forgot to get a picture of the cache (distracted by talking to the bumblebees. What? I never claimed to be normal).

Then we continued on our way to the third cache of the day, omg spiderz! in Furness Park (we were still in Nether Providence Township).

Needless to say, as soon as dad told me the name of that cache I freaked out, and did in fact see a spider hanging out right next to the cache. I wasn't about to put my hand in to grab the cache, so my dad pulled it out for me. Dads are useful like that. ;) Here's that cache:

I really wish the photos had come out of this park, but it was too dark. :( This is the only one I could get to come out remotely clear:

This park really reminded me of the lands around the estate where my D&D/writing character grew up (and no wonder- like a lot of the parks in Pennsylvania, this was apparently once an estate) and I wanted to get pictures since I could still see, but, alas, it was too dark for the camera. I'll have to drag my fiancé out to the park during the day so I can get some pictures.

I did some random research on the park when I got home and it looks like they're thinking about adding trails and such; this saddens me because I think it's really nice in its natural state. Hopefully they won't change things up too much- as it is, I already found trash there. Stupid people, dirtying up such a pretty location. :(

The last cache we found was a much easier one- literally a walk in the park. This one was brookhaven walk, a quick grab just off the walking trail. It was dark by now so the only picture I was able to get was of the cache container while dad was signing the log:

I found this one right away, but my first reaction was "Hey, is that trash?" since it was stuck into those grates (I pulled it up to open it- it was attached with a wire).

We looked for one other cache after this (Phobia #5), but it was far too dark at that point and since it was in a parking lot, dad and I were afraid we'd be too suspicious poking around in the bushes with a flashlight. We'll have to find that during the day.

Have I mentioned that I LOVE old buildings?

noreply@blogger.com (Meri Greenleaf) — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 15:54:00 +0000

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!

Delayed update from July

noreply@blogger.com (Meri Greenleaf) — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 15:12:00 +0000

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.

Cooking Adventures

noreply@blogger.com (Live, Love, Laugh, Write!) — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 15:23:00 +0000

My dear elf-sister and I started this blog primarily to write about our geocaching adventures. We've both agreed though that we can use this blog to talk about any and all adventures! Which is fantastic, because I have had adventures lately, but none of them have been in the beautiful out doors. I've been too sick for that. (Darn those migraine monsters!) So here's my most recent non-outdoorsy adventure...

I've been experimenting with cooking a little bit again. Now normally that's a bit of an adventure just because we have no idea how it will turn out, or if we'll like it even if it does, but this time I managed to have even more of an adventure than normal! Small disclaimer, I was trying to cook while watching Serenity and with a migraine. I'm sure the distractions didn't help any. The hubby was being really good though and letting me pause the movie when I needed to get up and work on the food, so that was something! And I've only seen it about 5 times now, so it's not like I was desperate to see every second because I didn't know what was going to happen!

Now the first step in this recipe was to hard boil 6 eggs. I thought that was pretty straight forward. After all, I've boiled eggs many, many times! Apparently not. Normally when I hard boil eggs I boil them about 10 minutes after they start boiling (I like to be SURE they're done). Well, I somehow switched that around in my head (I blame the migraine) and I only cooked them for 10 minutes from when I turned the stove on. So I go to start shelling them, and I ended up with yoke ALL over my hand. Which was even more entertaining because I was shelling them in the living room while watching the movie. (Is shelling them even the right term? Ah well, good enough for me.)

So I tried putting the rest of the eggs back in some water and boiling them longer. I KNOW I've done that before successfully. Not this time. I ended up with exploding eggs. Which looked entertaining, but wasn't extremely helpful. I got frustrated and tossed the batch. My friend Cara told me later I should have saved them and mixed them in with scrambled eggs, she's smart, so I'm saving that tip for next time!

Ok, next batch of eggs and I follow boiling protocol perfectly. Now its time to cool the eggs off so that I can shell them. One of the other things Cara had told me (this was her recipe) was that the best way to cool eggs so the shell comes off easily is to let the water run over the eggs until their cool. This sounded much more efficient to me than my usual method of filling a bowl with cold water, dumping it, filling it again, and so on until the eggs were cool enough. With the first batch of eggs (the botched one) I had just tried doing this in my big spaghetti strainer. Well the top egg was pretty cold, but some of the others weren't because the water was just escaping. So with this second batch of eggs I put them in a bowl thinking the water could just over flow out the sides.

Well overflow it did! Make sure if you use this method to cool eggs that you DON'T let the bowl plug the sink. You'll end up with a lake in your kitchen, just like I did.

On the plus side, the eggs shelled easier than any I can ever remember making.

Oh, and the end recipe was pretty good too :)

Taurandirath adventures again!

noreply@blogger.com (Meri Greenleaf) — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 20:37:00 +0000

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!