Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Operation Letterbox

Tomorrow will be our debut into the world of letterboxing.

As I understand it, letterboxing is like geocaching with out the pricey GPS device. Instead of locating coordinates, you follow clues to find a hidden box. In the box is a logbook and stamp which you use to stamp your own logbook. It's like a passport. Searchers also have their own stamps to leave their mark on the logbook in the box.

Evidently, the "thing" is to have a unique, hand carved stamp.

I'm not really sure what that is or how to create it, so we went to the dollar section at Michael's and got mass-produced stamps with no sentimental value.

This website has a list of letterboxes from all over the country. I bet there are some near you.

I've discovered there are a lot of letterboxes at the Oregon Zoo so that's where we're going tomorrow.

Hopefully the kids will have fun searching and we will come home with a few stamps in our books.

8 comments:

Catherine said...

Wow. That's cool. I can't wait to hear how it goes. I looked up my area and there's a ton of letterboxes.

Samurai Mom said...

We LOVE letterboxing. Well I love it, Moose thinks it is OK and the kids hate it or like it depending on how hard it was to get there. Just FYI we risked our lives to get the Goonies one but it was missing. That was several years ago so it might have been replaced by now.

Erika said...

I've never heard of such a thing! How cool is that! I'll have to look into here.

I-Shüan said...

How did it go? Were they easy to find? Can anyone leave a letterbox anywhere, like at the zoo?

You could make a unique, hand-carved, perishable stamp out of a potato! :-)

Betty Grace said...

I've wanted to try this. It sounds so fun!!

Unknown said...

Hey Afton.....Robyn Schade Smith introduced letterboxing to us a few months ago and we LOVE it too!! We even did it with our Webelos and they all liked it (except my son of course)! Anyhow...there are a TON of letterboxes around. We haven't done any at the zoo yet, but it is on our list! Glad that you enjoy it too!!

David M. Lines said...

Hi Robyn are you the same Robyn Schade that went to Scotland? Cool Blog. It would be fun to talk after 20+ years. E- mail me. If your not the same robyn it is still a cool article.

Afton said...

I'm not Robyn, but I know her. She served her mission in Scotland. She used to be in my ward (still would be if the ward did not split). She is a good friend of mine but I don't see her too often anymore.