Adventures in Letterboxing
Wednesday, January 9th, 2008Papa and Gram (Joe’s parents) are visiting Philadelphia this week– Gram is busy with a conference, and that leaves Papa to spend time with us!
After lunch at the Dutch Eating Place in Reading Terminal Market, we headed out to the Wissahickon to find some letterboxes.
Papa came across his first letterbox a few years ago, and has been hooked ever since. He likes to find a letterbox in every place he visits. On our recent Thanksgiving trip to the Laurel Highlands, we drove 25 miles into the middle of nowhere just to find one. He came prepared with guides to several in the Philadelphia area, and we picked two in the Andorra section of Fairmount Park.
The first was in an area we just discovered– near Houston Meadow. We parked and started off on the hike, looking for “Wizardland“. We finally arrived to at the lone pine tree, and searched many trees with large holes in them, but we were unsuccessful in locating the wizard! How disappointing! That is the trouble with looking for letterboxes that were placed years ago.
We drove to Bell’s Mills and hoped we’d have better luck. The directions indicated that this letterbox would be a half mile hike from the Bell’s Mills parking lot. Ha! It was over a mile along Forbidden Drive one-way. After realizing that it was so much longer, we thought about turning back, but Lilia had fallen asleep eating her Cheerios, and turning back would have meant interrupting her nap, so we pressed on. We finally located the bench named in the clue, and Joe pulled out the letterbox– Success!! Joe had made two cat stamps for letterboxing purposes, but had never used them before. So Kiss the Mountain Air became our first official letterbox find.
Where is the Wizard??
No Wizard Here!
Philadelphia’s Only Covered Bridge
The Bench We Were Searching For!
Kiss the Mountain Air
We stamped the book (and had to come up with “trail names”).
Lilia missed out on the letterbox find
