Letter Boxes

Today for our Enrichment activity we went to do Letter Boxes. I had never done letter boxes before, so here's the jest of it. You can do one of two things (or both if you want). First thing, you can look for letter boxes. You get the clues to the location online and then go from there. The other thing you can do is hide your own box. In each "box" or Tupperware container there is a stamp and a notebook in a plastic bag (sometimes a pen, a pen is nice). When you go to find Letter Boxes you take your own stamp too, kind of like your signature, along with a notebook that kind of acts like your passport. So when you find a box you open it up, take your stamp and stamp it on the notebook inside the box and put the date and your name. Then you take the stamp from inside the box and stamp it in your own notebook, writing down what the hider called the box and the date. For our first box we went to Hollywood Cemetery.



Here's Emily stamping the very first notebook with our signature. This is when she came up with our name...The Virgin Bees"...you had to be there.

There's our signature!

This is me stamping the first stamp in our "passport"! It was so exciting!

The second box we were looking for told us to look for a grove of stumps, and something about a man name Lloyd, it gave us directions to find it because finding one particular headstone in Hollywood Cemetery is like looking for a needle in a haystack. But this is the "grove" we finally found.

They're pretty cool huh? They aren't trees, can't tell if you'll be able to tell, but they are all headstones. Maybe the Lloyd's are a family of lumberjacks. You'd be surprised how many headstones are made to look like they are made of wood in the cemetery. I don't know if you can see but "Lloyd" is carved on the "trunk". It's awesome!

Then we decided we wanted to hide our own box. Emily asked me where I would like to go and she gave me a few options. When she found out that I have never been to Pump Park (or even heard of it for that matter) so that's where we went. When we parked the car in front of this sign I just knew we had to be in a good part of town.

For the sarcasm impaired...that was sarcasm. Before we hid the box we decided to look for one in the area since we had the clues already printed out.
I found this box so I had to take a picture because I was so excited that I saw it first!

We learned a lesson today, well, Emily learned one because my mom trained me pretty well to not trust strangers. It wasn't that anyone got hurt, but I think it was quickly realized that it could have happened. A man we had seen earlier suddenly comes around the trail and asks if we want to see a snake. Immediately I said, "Not really." Because I don't really want to see a snake, snake-a-phobia is what endears me to Indiana Jones. Emily, being brave, says sure. So I got dragged along. The man was further ahead of us so I leaned towards Emily and said, "Hey, I've got some puppies in my car you want to go see them too?" I stiffened at the thought of being any where near a snake and Emily finally realized that following a stranger probably wasn't a good idea. She asked if I had my phone on me and I only had my camera, but since it was in my pocket we pretended it was a phone just in case. Couldn't find the snake (thank goodness) and we parted ways. Then we continued our search for a good place to hid our box.

Not sure if you can see how big this spider is, but I got to hear Emily scream, which made up for the scary time I had watching out for a slithering snake. He was big, and he was yellow and black and Emily got really close before she saw him. We could have died!
We finally picked a spot, a creepy, creepy spot near a haunted pump house. I wouldn't go down the alley way, so I took a picture from the turn of Emily putting the box into a cubby we found.
In case you were wondering it was just Emily and me. We had about 8 people say they would come but when the time came around it was just the two of us, we waited for half an hour and then we went out. Such is the life in a YSA ward I suppose, Enrichment just doesn't get the greatest turn outs. But personally, I didn't mind it being just the two of us, we still had a lot of fun and I can't wait until we do it again!