The Wind, New Friends and My 700th Box

It is 4 o'clock on Monday morning, and my bones and my joints still hurt. A lot. But my feet feel good, thanks to my wonderful hiking boots. Yesterday was a truly wonderful day but I totally overdid it. I haven't been actively hiking for several weeks and boy, do I know it today. I have to admit that when I got up yesterday, I wasn't at all sure that I would even go boxing. The wind was blowing very strongly and from inside my safe little house, it sounded very cold outside. I had had tentative plans to meet Out of Sight, No Time for Fun (my son in law's new trail name) and Milkmonster at the Sadsbury Preserve to do a series of boxes by Hikerdad, but Laura had bailed out the night before when she heard the weather report. And I was thinking that maybe I should do the same. But when I went outside to take some things out to my car and discovered that when the wind wasn't blowing, it was really very comfortable, I quickly loaded up and was on my way to do three new boxes by Dogs with Wings. They are mystery boxes Myazaki's Neighbor, Here Be Dragons and Here Be Little Dragons so I can't give away too much except to say that they were within comfortable driving distance for me. While doing these, I watched yet another beautiful sunrise over a lake. It seems as though I have been doing a lot of that lately. Boxes and lakes seem to go together. And I have to add that if you have not found a Dogs with Wings box lately, you need to do it and just enjoy the stamps that Sherry has been creating. They are truly works of art.

From here I headed to another new box by Dogs with Wings, Arashi . I had been fortunate that Sherry had given me an advance copy of the clues and, in fact, I met her and she accompanied me on my search for this box. We then went on to find the three new Hikerdad boxes in Sadsbury Preserve, a really neat little park which neither Sherry, who lives about 15 minutes away nor I have ever heard of. These boxes appear to be a tribute to Hikerdad's children and are very sweet. We located Sweet Pea , Sir Ty's Shield and Kokopelli while in the park. By this time I was beginning to feel the walk. I had done about 5 miles and it was only 10:30 in the morning and we still had more boxing ahead of us. But on the way out of the preserve, I felt a little rejuvenated when we ran into two members of Otis Friends. This is a team of a Mom and Dad and three children. On this day, Dad and the youngest member of the team, Amy, were out boxing. Amy is a little younger than the Milkmonster who has boxed with me but is still a challenge because he is more interested in picking up leaves and rocks. Well, Amy's dad was carrying her through the woods and she seemed so content to be safely perched in Daddy's arms. We exchanged some chit chat and went on our ways, Otis Friends to find the boxes we had just found, and Dogs with Wings and I to find our cars. I did feel a bit more energized when I realized that I had only myself to get to the car without a little one in my arms.

We were now on our way from Chester County to northern Lancaster County to meet Sheba to do the Pink Panther and Black Swan boxes at Middle Creek Wildlife Preserve. I had attempted to do one of these boxes last July and just could not locate it but I figured that with three of us searching this time, it would be a piece of cake. All I had to do was make it up the side of the mountain....make that two mountains. There are two separate boxes in the Millstone Celtic Knot series on two separate trails. Sherry and I reached the meeting spot before Sheba did and as we got out of the car to walk into the Visitor Center, the wind kicked up in full force. I could just imagine what it was going to be like walking against it up a mountain and prayed that it would be at our backs and pushing us up instead. When Sheba arrived and we were plotting our course, I figured that the box that I had attempted was the more difficult of the two so I encouraged my hiking buddies to do the Celtic Knot box first. And they listened to me and I was very, very wrong. Oh my goodness, I never thought we would reach the top of that rocky, steep trail. If there wouldn't have been a box at the top of it, there would have been no way that I would have made it. And to make it worse, there were many people on the same trail who appeared to be walking it for FUN!! Sick, sick people.

As we reached the top and we could see the site where the box was located, we also saw that there were two people already there. Whoa, there was no way that I was going to have climbed that hill and not get my box. I also saw that they were holding pieces of paper in their hands and appeared to be there for the same reason we were there. Hmmmm, what to do? I was too tired by this time to wait around so I just went up and asked the man if he was a letterboxer and he told me that he would come clean and admit that he was. Thank heavens. We didn't have to wait.. But then he told us that this was their third trip to the site to find this box and they had not had any luck. I quickly found out why. On my first trip to this park, I didn't search for the second box because I hadn't done my homework ahead of time and did not know what a "snag" tree was. Apparently, they had run into the same problem. As I chatted with the man, whom we found out was Glenn, Sherry quickly went to the snag tree and pulled the box right out of its hiding spot. His companion, Jeanne, was so delighted that the box was there. This couple were not really newbie boxers, they have quite a few stamps, but they were not aware of the little traditions that we have. They seemed delighted when we explained that we wanted to exchange stamps with them so we all stamped in to the box together, exchanged stamps and shared logbooks. It was great and it was the first time I have ever done an exchange on the trail. Oops, I just remembered, that I did do my first exchange with Dogs with Wings on the trail but that was semi planned.

After our pleasant break with our new boxing friends, we moved up to the vista at the top of the mountain. Here Sherry is enjoying the vista in the conventional way while Sheba chose the more adventurous route.
Well, we still have one more mountain to climb and we had a quick discussion about doing it. Since the next box we found would be my 700th, Sheba made the comment that it would be a wonderful thing to find a challenging box for the occasion. But this was the same trail I had taken once before and was unsuccessful in my search. And by this time, I was truly exhausted. OK, I told them, let's do it. I have to admit that this was my view most of the way up the trail, lagging behind my patient friends.And unfortunately, we were again unable to locate the box. One of the clues said we had to find where MC left his mark. We discovered that MC liked to leave his mark in many different places and none of them were the right one for us. After about an hour of poking around behind every rock in the area, we finally decided to admit defeat and headed back to the cars. But I still wanted to find my 700th so we headed for Pink Panther's house to locate a WOM box, the Happy Birthday Letterbox which was a present from Black Swan to her on her birthday. After enjoying their little Halloween display, we went on to search for this box and we found it and I had my 700th find! Even though too tired to jump for joy, I was kind of excited about this landmark.
We went inside to stamp in and to enjoy Pink Panther's scrapbooks. These are made by her parents who live in an RV and travel the country. They try to do letterboxes at most of their stops and prepare a page for a scrapbook with a brief description, a picture or two and an image of the stamp from every box for their daughter to vicariously enjoy. These were truly wonderful to look at and I even recognized some of the stamps from my boxing experiences. It was a nice relaxing way to end our letterboxing day. What a day, what memories, what fun, what fatigue!

Now on to the Pub Crawl!