I wonder how many of you are aware of a hobby known as letterboxing. I was oblivious to it's existence until July when Family Fun magazine ran a small blurb about it. It involved choosing a signature stamp (something to represent you as an individual or a family), printing off clues to a box in your area and strapping on your walking shoes. Intrigued, I checked out the website at www.letterboxing.org (imagine that- an entire site dedicated to this topic floating around cyberspace and I never knew anything about it!) and learned everything I ever needed to about the origin of this hobby, the rules of play, how to carve my own stamps and on and on.....
Well, the more I read, the more I wanted to try this thing out. I carved our first signature stamp, "family time", as this was to be our new family hobby. I printed out clues to several boxes in the Eugene/Springfield area (because I love options and it turns out there are s e v e r a l) and off we went armed with water bottles, hiking sticks and ink. We searched over and over for our first box and found no sign of it. (Were we doing this right? Did we just miss it? Let's go back to the beginning and try again...) Though we didn't find a letterbox, we did discover a great place to skip rocks across the river. We spent about an hour teaching the kids the right grip, which rocks are better for skipping, the rock-skipping stance.....and most importantly, how to be flexible when things don't work out the way we expect them to. That was a great day and after rock skipping we tried another clue and actually found our first letterbox.......AND our first Hitchhiker stamp (a fantastic bonus)!! Awesome. God provided the opportunity for us to show our kids what can happen if you persevere.
So, it's been almost 4 months since our first LB (letterbox) adventure. Since then we have introduced this hobby/sport to some of our good friends (now known as Joy4Life on the letterboxing trail), a best friend (Candy) and a neighbor (horse girl). Given time, I hope to get everyone addicted to this wonderful treasure hunting adventure even if I have to carve all the stamps myself! We are steadily filling up our logbook with creative stamps and filling our hearts with memories with each other.......like the time we marathon-letterboxed with Joy4Life hiking all over this huge park. (The kids weren't very interested in boxing for a week or so afterward!) ...or like last Saturday when we found a tiny little green frog about 1/2 inch long while hunting a box in Armitage Park. After everyone marvelled at how small it was, we put it back where we found it and Emily was so concerned that we had accidently hurt it somehow that she stayed with it until it finally hopped away....... We are completely addicted to letterboxing and love to spend time doing it together. I hope this will be a tool to keep us bonding even through the upcoming teenage years when it often becomes the norm for siblings to avoid each other like the plague.
As a whole, letterboxers seem to be almost a secret society. I've never overheard anyone talking about it in the grocery store or doctor's office. You would never know it, but they are probably all around you. Planting boxes, writing clues, carving stamp after stamp.....if you are interested and want to join this elusive group, just check out the sites I listed at the end of this blog. Joining is absolutely free and you will find many seasoned veteran letterboxers who are willing to help out a "newbie". Heck, I'll help ya out too!!
You know it's a good thing when your 3yr old wakes up and wants to know "Are we going letterboxing now?" !
For more info. on this hobby see:
www.letterboxing.org
www.atlasquest.com
or come visit us and we will happily drag you all over creation and back hunting clues!
Happy Hunting,
AMEEBZ (that's our trail name)
