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.