Saturday, January 23, 2010

Letterboxing with Grandpa


Today my Father-in-law and I took the kids letterboxing. Letterboxing is hiking, clue-finding, and stamping all at once. You use the Internet to look up which trails have hidden letterboxes and then use clues to find the boxes hidden in the forest. When you find a letterbox, you take out the stamp that is hidden inside and stamp your own notebook. You also bring a stamp with you and leave an impression of your stamp on the booklet included in the letterbox. Here is the link to the North American Letterboxing site: www.letterboxing.org There are letterboxes hidden all over the world!

Letterboxing was great fun for Sweetness and even Spunky Girl too...it adds another element to hiking to make it more fun. Plus, it is like giving the kids a license to go off-trail when their mom usually says "we should stay on the trail and not disturb the underbrush" when we're hiking. Here's a cute picture of Sweetness looking for a letterbox on top of this huge stump.


Here is a picture of Spunky Girl finding a letterbox (with Sweetness and Grandpa looking on).


There was one funny, slightly gross thing that happened while we were out today. Grandpa had the kids up the trail looking for a letter box, so I slipped away towards a fallen tree that I thought looked cool. Once I got back to the tree, I noticed that someone had littered a piece of paper back there...and it appeared to be the same letterboxing clue page that we were carrying with us. I thought I should do the world a service and clean up the other person's littering...you know, the whole "make the world a better place" thing. As I picked up the paper, I noticed that it had something brown all over it. Let's see...a piece of paper with brown on it, back by this fallen tree that would make a good place to sit privately. Ewww. I didn't make the world a better place after all, 'cause I left it right there and skedaddled back to my kids.

It was a lovely way to spend the morning. Beautiful scenery. The girls loved looking for the letterboxes. The Big Guy wasn't having a great day and he pooped out early, so I got extra exercise in by carrying him ALL THE WAY BACK. The little bugger is heavy! I'll leave you with these pictures of my angels:

The Big Guy:

Sweetness:

Spunky Girl:

2 comments:

  1. That sounds so fun! I'm going to have to check and see if we have it anywhere around here.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I think mother nature will forgive you!

    And other than that, the letterboxing sounds like a lot of fun. :)

    ReplyDelete

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