Gobbling Up the Boxes

For Thanksgiving, Artemis and I went to visit the family in Ohio. So of course, as part of our new hobby, we had to find time to do some letterboxing. As you may remember from the first entry, the small town in Ohio we were travelling to actually has a surprising number of boxes listed.

Our first 'out of state' box was one we stopped for on the way to my mother's. It is actually located at the Native American burial grounds next to where I went to high school. We also spent some time that day at the main city park, finding five more there and failing to locate two others. That actually means for the third time in three letterboxing outings, we set a personal one day record for finds.

The next day was Thanksgiving and we went to spend it with Grandma/Mom (Diane is my aunt for those who may not know). Granny lives out in the country and her property backs up to a state park. Well, as luck would have it, a few boxes were planted there so we went looking for them, dragging along some of the relatives who wanted to see what it was all about. We were able to find all three of them between meals then went back to gorge ourselves on food some more.

The next day, it was cold and windy. We decided to spend the day at a cemetery overlooking the town that had the largest concentration of boxes in the area. This also introduced another new boxing experience for us; juggling clues. There were eight boxes in the cemetery and six different starting points so we spent some time surveying as well as backtracking as we worked out the clues. Another thing I learned here, which I do not like, is that when the clue says 'take a reading of 127 degrees and go 64 paces' it is next to impossible to maintain the heading over that kind of distance!!! Combine that with the fact it was too cold to even take our gloves off to stamp and there was an annoyance factor mixed in today. One other "Note to Self" moment would be don't wear your good leather gloves to letterbox in the winter since digging in them is not really something you want to do... However, in spite of some struggles, we were able to find all eight boxes there which we looked for, again setting a new personal one day record for finds.

So for the trip, which was a couple partial days of boxing mixed in with visiting the family, we found 18 boxes!!! and were unable to locate only 2. We also upped our record for boxes found in a day twice, 7 followed by 8. The other oddity is that now we actually have found more boxes in Ohio than in Georgia, which is kinda funny to me... I am sure that won't last too long.

This could become a habit

Artemis and I went out for our second day of letterboxing today. We saw that there was a temporary box at the Gwinnett County Fair and since we needed to drive over to Lawrenceville to get it, we decided to head on over to Tribble Mill Park and look for a series planted there.

This was actually only the third county park I had been to since moving to Georgia in 1999. The weekend I arrived we went over to George Pierce Park in Suwanee as well as to Buford Dam (Army Corp) and walked the Laurel Ridge Trail and I used to eat lunch at Rhodes Jordan Park occasionally when working in Lawrenceville.

Anyway, it was a nice walk around the trail, though there were a lot of joggers so it was hard to be sneaky, and we were successful on finding all four boxes we were hunting, which is a new personal one day record. Granted, this is only the second day ever so that is not a complete surprise. ::grin::

In the beginning...

   The Game's Afoot
   Go past the granite marker with a red arrow,
   across the railroad tracks, alongside the
   stone wall, across the road, down the winding
   dirt path, around the boulder on the right,
   up to the pine tree. Reach into the hole in
   the rotting log nearby and Bingo! There it is,
   a little Tupperware container. On the lid is
   written, “This is not trash! This is a
   letterbox.”

This small introduction to an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution caught my eye. There were a couple of pictures and a short story about "letterboxing". Obviously, I had no idea what that was but from reading it, I got the impression that it was some sort of 'treasure hunt/hiking' type game. Apparently there was some sort of event happening at Stone Mountain Park which is what prompted the article in the first place. I have to admit, like many things, the concept struck me as mildly interesting but, like many things, I never gave it a second thought after reading it.

Skip ahead in time a couple of days. My aunt Artemis has read Time Magazine for years but has a real knack for being 3-4 weeks behind the current issue. Well as luck would have it, she had just finished the July 26th, 2004 edition and wanted me to read an article that she thought sounded curious. It was called Hide-and-Seek for Grownups: An outdoor adventure that combines art, athletics and mystery. Amazingly, this was ANOTHER article about "letterboxing" and since it seems to have popped into my life again so quickly after the first AJC article, I decided to at least poke around a little bit. Therefore, like most people, I went to the LBNA website (it was listed as a clue source in a graphic in the AJC article but they don't include images in the download version)and started poking around; I checked out the town I live now, the town in Ohio where I grew up, as well as any other random places I had ever been that popped into my head. I even had a good time trying to figure out exactly where the ones hidden in Ohio were located based solely on reading the clues. The other thing I most remember about that initial search was that the small country town in Ohio where I grew up had more boxes than the entire metro Atlanta county where I live now (something like 50/40), which amazed me. Of the boxes in Gwinnett county Georgia, one was actually planted in the park that backs up to the subdivsion where Artemis and I live so we decided to go check it out. We drove over to the park one day, followed the clues and looked carefully through the logbook to see what it was all about. But unlike almost everyone else, we simply repacked everything, rehid the box and went back home. Over the next few weeks we worked on designing and carving signature stamps, picking out log books that we liked and getting an ink pad and compass. In the interim, I also solved another coded box that was hidden nearby so finally, on Septermber 6th, 2004, we went on our first official boxing trip. We walked back to that first box and stamped it ourselves, then proceeded to drive a few miles down the road and followed the clues for the next two.