Mercer Gardens Humble,TX~Letterboxing

John flew in to the Houston airport today. Jackson, Jenna and I drove down to pick him up, while Jeremiah hung out with Aeri, Skip and Stuart. Aeri loaned me her Hardy Toll road Easy Pass, which is such a convenient way to travel around town.
On the way back from the airport, we stopped off at a beautiful place called Mercer Arboretum and Botanical Gardens.
Interestingly, the park was donated by a Charles and Thelma Mercer in 1974. Oddly enough, my parent's names are Charles and Thelma.

The gardens and arboretum are free to visit and it has some of the most amazing varieties of flowers, trees, herbs, plants, and all types of growing things, including a few critters we saw: rabbits, turtles, lizards and skinks.

And of course, there were letterboxes hidden in the gardens, too!

It was another hot and humid day, but we enjoyed the peaceful trails. We found 3 letterboxes on the Gardens side of Mercer, and 2 letterboxes on the Arboretum side, including a huge box called the Pinata box which was filled with a cute pinata stamp and about 15-17 'filler' stamps(like candy, a top, yoyo, toys, kazoo, and on and on). Apparently a good number of letterboxers donated their own special pinata 'goodie' stamps to help make the Pinata stamp even more festive! We ended up covering 2 pages of our log books, full of goodies from this letterbox. What a really fun treat and clever idea for a letterbox, too!

Click on the pictures for close-ups!

Near the Japanese Tea House and Lily pond there was a 'Bayou-looking' bridge where about 20-30 eager red ear slider turtles gather just to get food. We had a ball feeding them crumbs and watching the water roil up all around the hordes of turtles. They literally swam from every corner of the pond once we dropped the food in the water!
The water was like a blender full of turtles!
We discovered another beautiful Quilt Block stamp placed by a creative Texas letterboxer. This one was called "Grandmother's Flower Garden"
We were all awed by the different species of Bamboo in the garden's Bamboo Forest. Some were spreading, some clumping, some like floral arrangements, some short and some towering 20 feet above our heads! A magical place to take a walk. We found a cute "Panda Bear" stamp in this area, too.
Some more beautiful Bamboo.