Thanksgiving Week Letterboxing

Tuesday of my vacation week, was the day that I planned on doing some letterboxing, and of course, it started out as a dreary, rainy day. I am getting really good at boxing in the rain. My marathon at Tyler Park was in the rain, one of my days at State College and now Tuesday was in the rain. Oh, well, new challenges, new opportunities.

I started out at Nolde Forest, a really pretty little park a few miles from home. It is amazing how many boxes are there and yesterday, I found the last of the publicly listed ones. If anyone wants to find a lot of boxes in a fairly short amount of time, Nolde is the place to go. This park offers a lot of variety in walking due to its elevation changes and the wonderful thing about the boxes there are that they are scattered everywhere in the park, from the lowest point to the highest, some in the north, south, east and west sections. There are boxes with published clues and several mystery boxes. There are boxes with very cryptic clues and those with very straightforward and direct clues. I am still searching for one more mystery box and when I find it, my Nolde quest will be complete, at least until someone else plants there! Yesterday, I found the elusive Yukon Cornelius box due to the revised clues by Pink Panther and Black Swan. It was still a little more difficult to locate than the rest of the Rudolph series there, but I persisted and was rewarded with the first find.

For anyone interested in a compilation of the publicly listed boxes in Nolde, here it is:

Pateke from New Zealand by Team Little Dog
Laura's Childhood Luvs - Garfield by Team Little Dog
Rudolph and Hermey by Pink Panther and Black Swan
Santa and Yukon Cornelius by Pink Panther and Black Swan
Witch Way in Nolde Forest by Pink Panther and Black Swan
Nolde Forest Double Seven, Double Eight and Double Nine by ShredMTB
Nicky's Soggy 11th Birthday by Nick's Crew
and if you search the letterboxing sites carefully, you will find several mystery boxes there.

When I finished at Nolde, I stopped in Kenhorst and managed to finally get the Sacred Garden Geocache / Letterbox hybrid. I had visited this Potter's Field two times before unsuccessfully. The first time, I couldn't find the box, the second time, I found the box but it was missing the stamp and finally SUCCESS. An even more interesting find on this hunt was gas at $1.98 a gallon in Kenhorst. On the way home, I stopped to check on my own After the Morse Code box and found it still safely hidden and in good shape.

Later in the day, I decided to look for a couple of pretty easy looking boxes on my way to see Nicholas. I stopped in Ephrata to search for Spongebob Letterboxing Adventures #1 but was not successful there. I am pretty sure I was in the right spot, but since it wasn't there and the box had been found in August, there is always the chance that I was very wrong. It was raining pretty steadily at the time I was in this park and since the location where I thought the box was located was in a swampy area, I figured I had better come back another time. Then I did find the mystery box, Witness, the Lost Footage by Mapsurfer. How ironic is that, I couldn't find Spongebob but I did find a Mapsurfer box!