But today was redeeming and we went for our first Letterbox search through the Atlas Quest, A Letterboxing Community website! I first learned of this game through Melynda at Your Wild Child, and knew I wanted to play with my kids too.
Letterboxes are little caches where folks hide a stamp and a log book. It provides for a mini treasure hunt to liven up your day. People sign up on the Atlas site giving clues to the location of their letterbox, and other folks search and find the cache. After finding the cache you stamp your book with their stamp as well as stamp their book with yours. I think stamps and puzzles are good for kids...
It took me a few months to finally get it together and find letterboxes in our town, but we did it.
Here is the play by play.
First, we went to Atlas Quest and did a search for our town. The results came back with 15 letterboxes in our town!! Whoo Hoo!!! And I had some business that I need to conduct at the letterbox I chose for our first journey.
We hopped in the truck with our little black book.
And our stamp and ink pad.
Then drove to our destination. The big orange sign is one of the clues for this letterbox.
So following the directions, we found the cache covered with rocks at the southeast corner of the big sign.
There was a waterproof can hidden in this letterbox, which we promptly opened.
The letterbox stamp was:
We stamped our entry into the letterbox notebook and put our town and date.
This whole hunt was great! The kids were excited and it made our ordinary trip to the hardware store more fun. There was one little problem however. We were sad that the stamp for this letterbox was MISSING. :( So we could not stamp our book.
Next time we will fair better and with 14 other boxes in our community I think we have some puzzling to do. I know the next location is at the local dog park and we drive past it all the time.
Anyway, check it out! Go to Atlas Quest! It can't hurt now can it?
