The Carnival of the Lost Souls

For many reasons, I haven't been to a letterboxing gathering for several years but when one was posted that looked as though it would be as much fun for my grandson, African Wild, as it would be for me, I began working on my daughter, Outofsight, to allow me to take him along with me.  A family camping trip had been planned for the same weekend so my daughter was hesitant to have him with me instead of with them but when he expressed an interest in attending the second grade "dance" being held at his school on Friday night, I was granted weekend custody.  Ironically, about half way through the day on Saturday, I got a phone call from Outofsight telling me that they were heading for home because they had been placed in the same camploop as the permanent campers and because it was the last weekend of the season for this campground, all of the long term people were busy winterizing their RVs and no Halloween activities were planned for the children in the campground.

The gathering, The Carnival of the Lost Souls, was hosted by Ralph Spoilsport who was resplendent in his tuxedo and I was in awe of the multitude of seasonal appropriate stamps that he had carved for the event.  Ralph is an excellent carver and I have always been thrilled to find his normal planted boxes so all of these new stamps were such a delight.  Here he poses with Undead Hunter Fred who doesn't look at ALL the way I expected him to look.  I was also very happy to meet him after finding many of his boxes and also enjoying his carving skills.

 

African Wild had almost squealed in delight when we pulled into the parking lot of the Mount Laurel Community Park and we saw the playground within a few yards of the main event area.  He managed to stay with me in the pavilion for about four stamps before the call of the merry go round pulled him away from me for most of the remainder of the day.

 

African Wild did manage to come into the pavilion with his new friend, Idlesun in the white hat, to watch and listen in fascination to his first heavy metal band, Terror Inc.

 Lots of stamping into event boxes and personal travelers as well as personal signature stamps.  Here in the green, Anne of Green Gables, in the blue is Blue Delft, and with the cat whiskers is SuzyQLou.

 The Booshmen, father and son, and more excellent carvers, hard at work on the plethora of stamps.

 Long time letterboxing friend, Leafcutter, and our new letterboxing acquaintence, Night0wl, exchange stamps.

It was so nice to be reunited with other long time friends, on the left, Wednesday Bowler and Celtic Cat with a very delightful new friend, Treasurehonas.  With her back to the camera is Lotus.

Another new letterboxing acquaintance, standing in the center of the picture, is SWGS.

 Two more long time friends, Pink Panther and Geckospot working on the event stamp.

 African Wild and Idlesun made a return visit to listen to the band.

 

 

 The boys then joined the rest of the kids on the most popular spot of the day.

 The hazy moon was high in the sky just as Ralph announced that the night boxing was ready and we were all treated to nine more Ralph stamps.

 Till we had reached box number nine, African Wild was almost asleep on his feet.  We were hardly in the car for five minutes before he was out cold and even after I had completely emptied out the car which contained everything but the kitchen sink, he was still asleep.  I finally had to wake him to get him into his bed where he collapsed on the bottom bunk instead of climbing to his normal bed on the top.  I knew that the day was a success for him when I overheard him chattering nonstop to his parents all of the good things that he had enjoyed.  I already knew that it was a good day for me also for so many reasons but most of all because Ralph created a day that made my grandson happy.

Dolphins

Who doesn't love dolphins!  I can't imagine anyone who doesn't get excited when they are at the beach and see those heads bobbing up and down in the water.  A long time ago, I was told that if there were dolphins in the area, sharks would stay away.  I am not sure how true that is but I choose to believe it.  My daughter has always been intrigued with all things dolphin and remembers to this day exactly how they look from when she could still see.  I often buy her dolphin related gifts because I know that she can visualize them in her mind.  

One of the things that I noticed as I was driving around Virginia Beach was the plethora of dolphins in front of so many businesses and tucked into nooks and crannies everywhere.  Somewhere I came across an article that said that the Virginia Beach dolphin statues are sold to businesses and the proceeds go to a charity. Great idea!  Here are some, but not nearly all, of the dolphins that I saw. All of these were near letterboxes that I sought.

 

 

 

 

 

More Virginia Beach

By day three in Virginia Beach I was getting a little frustrated with all of the missing boxes so I decided to focus on a series of boxes by Casa del Sol, all located in various libraries throughout the county.  The beauty and details and thought that were put into this series lifted my spirit and renewed my hope at finding more boxes.  I did manage to collect eight of these boxes and wished that I could have gotten the remaining few but time just ran out.  The ironic thing is that one of the boxes that I found had a stamp carved by my friend here in Pennsylvania, Pink Panther.  It was fun to see something familiar so far away.  One of the non letterboxing neat experiences that I had with this library series was the encounter with a group of blind people who were waiting with me for the library to open.  Those who know me, know that my daughter is blind, so it was interesting talking to this group of people who were gathering to use one of the meeting rooms in the library.  My daughter's guide dog had died a few years ago and she is in the process of working towards a new one since my grandchildren are older now and my daughter gets out and about more these days.  One of the men waiting had just gotten a beautiful new dog and he was very excited and proud of the job that the dog was doing for him.  It was fun to eavesdrop on the chatter and to be able to identify with their issues.

The picture below is of one of my other terrific non letterboxing experiences.  If I lived locally, I would be inclined to put a box in at this lotus pond.  I have never seen so many lotus plants in one location before, it was an awesome experience.

 After these boxes, I was hungry so I headed for one which was located at Grumpy's Bar and Grill.  Two funny things happened here.  First, one has to ask the bartender for the box and as she handed it to me, she asked me just what was going on with this box thing.  She wanted to see what was in it so I quickly explained the process and she was very intrigued.  She went on to tell me that she had just given the box to a man a couple of weeks prior to my visit but she didn't have the opportunity to get the information that she was curious about from him.  I had to laugh as I looked at the last finder of the box and saw that it had been another of my local letterboxing friends, Otis Friends.  It's a small world!  

Then, as I was stamping in, another patron came into the bar and the bartender asked him if he was coming to watch the Eagles game on Sunday.  That caught my attention since I am a big Eagles fan (yes, even with Michael Vick, I still root for the Eagles) so I asked her if she meant the Philadelphia Eagles.  She proudly told me that it was indeed the Philadelphia Eagles and that their bar had the third biggest Eagles fan club in the world.  Who wudda thunk that I would travel six hours from Philadelphia to find people who supported our own team.

I am not sure where I took the picture below but I thought it was neat to see all of the flowers on this cactus.  I have seen these in the deserts of Nevada but don't remember ever seeing one with this many flowers.  In fact, I have even grown one of these myself after bringing cuttings back from a visit to California and I never saw ANY flowers on it.   This one was very beautiful and I wish I would have gotten a closer picture of it.

 

Some of the boxes took me into Virginia Beach's center city.  I drove by this couple on the bench in search of a parking spot and when I got out of the car, I was rather surprised to see they were still kissing.  It took me a minute or two to realize that they were not real people. There was supposed to be a box near here but guess what...it was missing!  Luckily for me, there were two other boxes in the area.

  

My last stop on this day turned out to be a double stamp stop.  The Lynnhaven house is the home of a letterbox but it also has its own location stamp so I was able to get two for the price of one. I also was able to get a whole packet of patches and some more postcards!

 

When I got back to my hotel that evening, I was very disgruntled to find that I had to park in the satellite parking area which was two blocks from the hotel.  After spending the day walking, I wasn't upset at walking the two blocks but I was a bit nervous at walking back and forth past a homeless camp area.  The people there paid no attention to me at all but it just made me nervous.  I have to admit that I have never seen as many homeless people, even in New York City, as I saw in Virginia Beach.  Then when I got back to the hotel and I asked the desk clerk if there was any security checking on the cars in the satellite parking area which was in a rather run down residential neighborhood and she looked at me as though I was crazy, I wasn't feeling very confident that my car would be there the next morning.  As I made my way back to the  hotel, I had to laugh when I saw this sign because it exactly reflected how I was feeling. And my car was fine when I left the next day.

 The next morning was my last day at the beach and I was rather anxious to be on my way. I missed my little people and was ready to end my solitude but I decided to take a walk up to the beach to get one sunrise picture.  Unfortunately, it was very overcast and this was all I could get.

 My net result for my four and a half days in Virginia Beach was 33 new boxes found and about 20 not found.   The ticket I got for running a red light in Delaware on the way home was expensive.  The time alone was important to me and priceless.   The appreciation to be home again was invaluable.

Boxing at the Beach

Every autumn, I take a mental health break and go away for several days alone.  I love being alone.  Don't get me wrong, I also love being with my family but alone time is a pure pleasure for me.  Most years, I go camping and spend the days touring whatever area I am in by letterboxing.  This year, I decided to head to Virginia Beach after I found a great deal which got me a hotel room a few feet from the boardwalk for a cheaper rate than the local campgrounds.  I have to admit that the thought of a bed and a shower were more appealing to me this time than my normal sleeping on an air mattress in the back of my SUV and cold showers in the communal shower rooms.  So I set off on the first morning and made good time, arriving in Virginia and my first planned stop for a box at a rest stop.  This first experience set the tone for me letterboxing failures the rest of the week.  I got out and nonchalantly headed in the direction that I thought the box would be in.  I had camera in hand as I often do when I am doing drivebys and within a few minutes, I was approached by a lady who was cleaning the restrooms who asked me if I was there to see their new enclosure in the back of the building.  I told her no and headed in the opposite direction, casually taking pictures of the red berries which were in full bloom on the trees.  A few minutes later, she came back and asked me for my card.  My card???  As it turned out, the woman didn't believe me when I told her that I wasn't there about their new enclosure so she went to her boss who told her I needed to give them a card before I could do my inspection.  Needless to say, I left without my box.

My next box failure came on the 14 mile long Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel.  First of all, I should say that I am deathly scared of large expanses of water which makes me very, very nervous on bridges because I always imagine them breaking and my falling into that large expanse of water.  Fourteen miles of solid bridge gave me the heebie jeebies just thinking about it.  But it was the shortest way to get to Virginia Beach and I really wanted the box so I took the bridge.  Well, there was no box.  There was lots and lots of water to see and I did manage to get a few postcards and a patch in the gift shop but box number two was a failure.

 As I reached the northern end of Virginia Beach I stopped at First Landing State Park to search for several boxes there.  My first thought as I entered the trail was that I had made a really, really wrong turn and I had ended up in Florida.  These cypress swamps look just like the area along the St. Johns River near our home in Florida.  While I like the wild look of these swampy areas, I associate them with SNAKES!  I did manage to find two boxes in this park and didn't find about four of them. 

 My nest stop was my hotel which didn't really live up to its ad but was more than sufficient for what I needed so I got myself settled in and headed up the boardwalk for my next box at the Coast Guard station. 

 

Guess what!  It was missing!  Again, I managed to get a few postcards and a patch so the visit wasn't for nothing.

 Early the next morning, just at daybreak, I headed for a box at the Convention Center.  I figured that the earlier I got for a driveby at a busy place like this, the better it would be.  But I was WRONG!  I quickly located the spot that the box was hidden and watched in dismay as the parking lot across the street began to fill with what looked to be homeless people.  They congregated for a while and then received instructions from the person in charge on what parts of the area they needed to start picking up trash.  I just wasn't going to win this day either.  I was able to park my car in front of the box and retrieve it without suspicion but I couldn't pull the same trick to return it so for the first time in my boxing life, I took a box with me and returned it at the end of the day.  Yeah!  I had a found box!

 This is a picture that still makes me a bit agitated as I wonder what happens here in Pennsylvania to make our gas prices forty cents a gallon higher.  I did enjoy this price while I was in Virginia.

 One of the neatest things about being outside so much this week was the sound of the Navy jets flying overhead.  My guess is that the residents are not so thrilled with the sound which is almost non stop at some times of the day but I loved it.  The sounds did stop for a few hours on this day as President Obama made a visit to the Virginia Beach amphitheater.  Since I saw no other planes either, they may have closed the airspace during the President's visit.

 In the background of this picture is the Virginia Beach amphitheater a few hours after the President's visit and an area where I did have success finding a box.  I was amazed that the city did so well with this visit.  I passed this area a couple of times before and during the visit and traffic flowed very smoothly.  I saw police on every corner but everything just seemed so calm and well organized that I was very impressed.

 Next came my only really bad experience of the week.  There are several boxes in Redwing Park,  all of them on different trails in different areas of the park.  I didn't find the first two that I searched for but third time was the charm with a Baqash box.  Then I was off to a different trail.  I pulled into the parking area and there was only one other car there with a man sitting in it.  Now, I did have a gun with me and I know how to use it but I don't really like carrying it with me because it is heavy and I have never felt really threatened before.  I left it in my car this time but think I should have taken it with me.  As I went after a box (which I didn't find) and had just given up, I turned around to find the man behind me.  He said "I never knew there were trails back here" which I thought was rather strange since he was parked at a trail head.  I nervously excused myself and headed back to my car as quickly as I could.  I then went to another section of the park and walked the trail looking for a couple of boxes and on my way back to the card, I saw this beautiful flower in the middle of the trail.  Now, I was the only one in these woods which were not really dense and I could see through them to the parking lot most of the way and this flower was NOT in the trail on my way into the box and it is autumn here and everything is getting brown and there were no nearby trees with any flowers on so where this one came from, I have no idea but it did spook me enough to send me back to my hotel to clean up and spend the rest of the day walking the boardwalk.

More Rain

 Labor Day weekend proved to be a bust here, lots of rain and gloom but I was tired of being around the house by Monday so I set off for Bucks County and several short walk boxes.  My favorite of the day was a Lotus box in a graveyard high on a hilltop.  In typical Lotus fashion, the clues were story like and very eerie.  When I reached the correct hunting area it seemed so isolated and when I got out of the car, I couldn't see too far because of the fog.  It was kind of spooky feeling and I have to admit to feeling a thrill of terror as I walked through the cemetery.  Then I heard voices.  I looked all around to see where they were coming from, fully expecting to see ghosts rising out of the graves.  The spell of the box was quickly broken as I saw two ladies jogging past the cemetery, followed closely but two men on bikes and some more women walking and talking.  What all of these people were doing on the top of the hill in a fairly desolate area still has me scratching my head.

 

 Some other boxes took me to a site that I had visited before on a non-letterboxing visit.   As a little girl, I was a bookworm and one of my strong memories was of having scarlet fever when I was about 12.  I remember my mother making a nest for me on the living room couch so she could keep an eye on me while she was cleaning.

  I also remember a stack of books being brought home from the library for me and among them was Pearl Buck's "The Good Earth".  I remember being totally shocked that a famous author could be from my home state of Pennsylvania.  Famous people lived far away in exciting places, they were not supposed to be in an ordinary area.  Pearl Buck lived in Bucks County when she wasn't in China and one day, while meandering through this county a few years ago, I had happened upon her home.  It was early in the morning so I didn't have the opportunity to actually take the tour of her property and this day, being a holiday, also meant the tours were closed.  So I enjoyed the pretty garden and grave site and found my boxes and went on my way.  Maybe one day, I will get there when they are actually open.

Rainy Day Boxing

 African Wild and I had planned a Labor Day weekend with lots of boxing but the weather was not cooperating with us.  So, we decided to chase after some local drivebys.  The first one was probably missing as we both poked through all the nooks and crannies of this stone wall.  At least it was a good opportunity to teach African Wild the important lesson of not destroying a wall by removing stones and rocks.

 The rain had let up a little bit by the time we had reached this park so I sent African Wild out to run some laps to burn off some little boy energy.  This was his cool down photo before we went off in search of a couple of other boxes.

It didn't take African Wild long to get bored with drivebys,  He likes action and activity so he reverted to playing Angry Birds to show me his boredom with driving from one box to another.  We quickly ended our boxing day and headed for home and more exciting things to do.