The Great Tree

Professor Askew · Posted: Wed Jan 10, 2007 8:44 am Post subject: Heard of Letterboxing?

I hadn't. But, it sounds like a lot of fun. The very basic idea of this hobby is to hike through various areas of the country (rural and urban) in search of buried boxes that contain a journal, a rubber stamp, a stamp pad, and a pen. You find clues to these boxes on the Internet. On your journeys you bring a journal and rubber stamp of your own and when you uncover the box you stamp your journal with the stamp from the box and you stamp the journal from the box with your stamp and then sign the book. Someone told me there are as many as 20,000 boxes hidden in the U.S.

I still have a lot to READ about this but it does look fun. I did a search in my area and there were tons of them. Five alone reside somewhere in downtown Hartford which was a real shock to me. And of course, you can include letterboxing as part of vacationing because these things are everywhere. And I'm sure there's a strong community behind it.

It might be a tricky hobby for winter. But, I'll report back with pics when I make my first discovery.
_________________
Professor Daniel Askew - Securing our reality from the machinations of the Station Masters.

AztecConsulting · Posted: Wed Jan 10, 2007 9:35 am Post subject:

I remember reading the original Smithsonian article and thinking it sounded very cool but at the time I had way too many projects going on. I currently have way to many projects going on but since there is one in the community park a few miles away, I may have to investigate it further...Now I just need a stamp!
_________________
Ham Radio KE5JBX
KI# 702765
"The next season of MOUL can’t be a play we watch, it must be a world we interact with..." - Aztec

Eleri · Great Tree Member Joined: 27 May 2004 Posts: 819

There's a chunk of overlap between geocaching and letterboxing. Some caches will have a letterbox stamp in it, but the concept is pretty similar.

We didn't get near as much caching done this summer as we would have liked, 'cept for the stuff we did on the way to and at Mysterium.

I've made our own puzzle cache:
http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=a02f85b6-5e9c-4006-bcee-0cf16dd579d0
_________________

Malakh · Posted: Wed Jan 10, 2007 11:05 am Post subject:

Yeah I was going to say that sounds a lot like a variation on geocaching. Boy I wish I had a GPS.
_________________
KI# 00635697