mile marker 515

Letterboxing

We've discovered a great new hobby - Letterboxing! I heard about this last summer from my friend Jill, but last summer was way to crazy for us to do it. I stored it away in my mental file and have been so excited to try it out. You can go here for all the details, but here's a quick overview. Let's see if I can make it make sense. People all over the country (and maybe even the world) put together letterboxes and hide them. They register each box online and put clues/directions to find the box the that they hid. There are some different websites that you can look up clues on, but the above link is the one we use. Inside each box is a rubber stamp and a notebook. Each person or group that is looking for a letterbox has a "trail name" and a few supplies. We are the Stealthy Falcon (we worked together to come up with that one). Here's our letterboxing kit:

We have a large notebook to write the clues in (Abby designed the cover - nice job!), a small notebook to put the stamps in that we find, a pen, our stamp and an ink pad. If we want to follow some harder clues (we stuck with the easy ones for now) we'll need to get a compass too. They are common and inexpensive items, most of which we had around the house already. We spent a little more on our stamp then I was hoping too ($8) but the feather was such a perfect symbol for the Stealthy Falcon that we had to get it.

So, you look up some clues, find the letterbox (hopefully), you put your stamp, trail name and where you are from in the notebook that is in the letterbox then you put their stamp in your notebook along with the date and where you found it. We want to find some more in the area and would really like to find some when we go on vacation later this summer. I think it might be kind of addicting:) After finding a few more I think we might try and make one to hide. We'll see.

Back to our adventure. We found three clues in our town that looked like they may still have an active letterbox. Things happen to the letterboxes so it's not guaranteed that it will always be there. We tried to keep expectations low and decided that we'd be happy to find at least one. We lucked out though and found two of the three that we were looking for! We're not sure if the third one was missing or just too hard to get to. The area that it was located in was quite overgrown with poky vines so we didn't look too hard.

We were all hot and sweaty when we finished so we headed to Sonic for shakes. Connor had his first taste of milkshake and is in love. He sure put up a fight if anybody even thought about touching his cup. The protective look on his face in this picture cracks me up!