Sunday, July 6, 2008

Letterboxing

Today we hatched as new Letterboxers and had our first find. What is Letterboxing you ask... check out the link. It is basically a treasure hunt with the prize being and exchange of rubber stamps. You get a set of clues (I believe there are several ways to obtain clues but we got ours from one of many letterboxing websites) that lead you to a box that contains a rubber stamp and a log book. Once you find a letterbox you stamp the log book within with your personal stamp and you stamp your personal log book with the stamp inside the found letterbox. Then you discretely re-hid it again for the next letterboxer to find. It combines hiking, nature, clues, art (as many of the stamps are handmade vs store bought), map reading and a basic sense of direction. We are very new and I had no idea how popular it is and really surprised to find that there are letterboxes stashed everywhere... really everywhere. Today, as a family we found our first box. Our collective trail name is Collins 5, but I think we will all come up with individual trail names too (Andrew is getting really creative). It was really a lot of fun. Besides all the local letterboxes we plan on making some side trips when we travel back and forth to Michigan and may even plant one of our own...what a nice way to let the kids stretch their legs after being in the car for several hours or to just burn some energy.

Think you want to try Letterboxing too... check out these sites
www.atlasquest.com
www.letterboxing.org

1 comment:

Joyce said...

Rae-I have never heard of this. I will have to add this to my task to read more about. It sounds like fun! The idea of "hidding" reminds me of what Josh Simpson an glass artist does with his infinity project. His little glass planets are hidden around the world in hopes someone will find them.