Cemetery Tour

I like pretending to be a tourist at home. Funny how we stop at all kinds of things when we're traveling, but drive right past interesting things close to home.  Take this beautiful cemetery, for instance:

I drive by it several times a week and never stopped to check it out.   I love old cemeteries, not for the creepy factor, but for the old worn stones with ornate carvings , overgrown with moss and lichens.  This local cemetery has it all.

The new, highly polished stones with perfect engraving don't hold much interest, but the old ones, much of the engraving worn away, tilted and tipsy, with dates that remind us that life was often short for out ancestors - those are the ones I like.

It helps to have friendly companions when wandering through cemeteries:

We visited a very old cemetery once that had an engraving about "eternal bliss", but written with the Colonial long S,  it read like, "eternal bliff."  Which is what we now call cemeteries, because we are easily amused by our own silliness.

Whether it's bliss or bliff, this is a serene spot:

I even managed to do a couple of recognizable rubbings.  Turns out the key is a graphite stick that makes solid contact with the stone.

Love being an at-home tourist and seeing things through that glow we usually reserve for far away spots.