Letterboxing

Letterboxing is something I mentioned in passing on a previous post but I feel like going into a little more detail. Letterboxing is a pretty fun pastime that I first learned of five or six years ago. It started in England where tourists who traveled the countryside would hide little boxes on hiking trails. The boxes contained a little notepad and a homemade stamp. Clues to the location of the box were posted on the internet and interested future hikers would look for them. If a hiker found the letterbox, he or she would put his or her stamp in the notepad in the box and put the stamp from the box into his or her notebook. So basically hikers would collect stamps of boxes they had found and leave a stamp showing where they had been.

So this little scavenger hunt spread and now there are literally thousands of boxes all over the world. Roxi and I searched for a couple of boxes here in Tennessee when she visited back in May and successfully found one. After that we were hooked. Since then, we have not only looked for several more in Louisiana, Kentucky and Tennessee, we have planted two of our own.
We planted one in Lafayette, LA on one my trips to visit Roxi and one near Van Buren, MO on the Float Trip last weekend. There are so many boxes, I really wasn't sure if anyone would ever look for ours, but lo and behold, this week, we got a message from someone who found the Ragin' Cajun box we planted in Lafayette! It was very exciting and has made us even more enthusiastic to find and plant more.

It is a wonderful little hobby that really gets you out to see some pretty neat sites. It is perfect for people who like to travel and gives an added incentive to explore their destinations. For more information on letterboxing go to Letterboxing North America or Atlas Quest: International Letterboxing. And in case you want to look for Wes&Roxi's letterboxes, they are the Ragin' Cajun box and the Float Trip box. Stay tuned to the websites though because more will be added soon!

Happy Hunting!