Moxie in Freeport

Our Saturday in Maine was mostly spent letterboxing with high school friend Keisha... the crazy girl who drove all the way to Maine from North Carolina! We found 5 of the 8 boxes in the Postal Heaven series. I'm not too sure why the series is named Postal Heaven because the underlying theme seems to be more about cemeteries. Oh wait, I get it now... the letterboxes are mostly planted next to or in cemeteries... it's like they're dead and gone off to letterbox heaven. Heh.

Ohyah so anyway, after finding as many of the boxes we could, the three of us continued up the Maine Turnpike and hit Freeport, where we happened to find some Moxie. My friend Robor (his name's not really Robor, he just goes by that on the intarwebs) had a conversation about Moxie about six months ago, and I'd mentioned that the one time I tried it when I was a kid, I thought it was disgustingly vile and tasted like drinking medicine. I also said I was willing to give it another try as an adult to see if my opinion had changed. Well I didn't think it disgustingly vile, but it still had a bit of a funky aftertaste that I didn't really enjoy. I'm not a big soda drinker anyway but I managed to make it through an entire can and still had a smile on my face. But that doesn't mean I'll buy another can ever again.

High Tech Stuff

Last Tuesday afternoon Joe and I went letterboxing, and found the box hidden along the West Essex Trail in Cedar Grove. Afterwords, we ate supper at the Pilgrim Diner on Route 23. The food was nothing special, but I got a kick out of it when we went to the counter to pay, and Joe said I should check out the graphics on the diner's computer monitor...

Very, very high tech. ;)

Duck Pond, Hawk Rock & Scarlet Oak Pond

It's a lovely weekend so yesterday Kenji and I drove up to Mahwah to do some letterboxing. We found one at the duck pond at Continental Soldiers Park. The name of that box was Duck Pond. Interestingly though we didn't see any ducks there. Instead, we saw and heard a whole flock of noisy Canada geese. We also saw two giant swans, one of which sitting in its nest. I never saw a swan's nest before, so that was pretty cool.

The next two boxes we found were hidden at Ramapo Reservation. The two boxes were called Hawk Rock and Scarlet Oak Pond. Both had been waterlogged, so we were unable to leave impressions of our stamps in their logbooks, but we were able to take away their stamp impressions.

It was such a beautiful day that lots and lots of people were out -- walking their dogs, going fishing, hiking, riding horseback. Oh, and letterboxing. :)

This view is from an outcropping of rocks along the way to the Hawk Rock letterbox:

Letterboxing Racoons

I got this picture from another letterboxer who found my Bright Idea letterbox on Friday. While they were stamping in, these two little guys came to check out what the letterboxing stuff was all about. :)

Monkey in the Monkey Pod Tree!

Today we have to go home -- boo. But at least we'll get to see Spammy,
Musubi, and Tiffknee. Yay!

Update 4/12/8 East Coast time: Now we are home. Since we had problems with getting a stable internet connection for my computer at Rebecca's house, I didn't post as many pictures as I would have liked while we were away. So now I'm going to add them in to the posts I made from my phone.

The monkey pod tree that Kenji is hanging from is at Moanalua Gardens, a privately run park near where Rebecca lives. Moanalua Gardens is home to the famous corporate icon, the Hitachi Tree. Our visit was an unsuccessful attempt to find letterboxes, but we had fun nonetheless.

I couldn't resist taking a photo of Japanese tourists taking photos of the Hitachi Tree. :)

Lemonade, Zen Fruit, a Spooky Forest and a Big Ride

Today is our first real day of vacation. Yesterday only sorta counts because it was a travel day. Plus before we flew away I still did my rounds of delivering books to old folks for the library.

Anyway on our first real vacation day we got out our letterboxing stuff and went to Robinswood Park in Bellevue and found Lemonade and Zen Fruit. They were cute stamps and the clues straightforward.

After we did a little bit of shopping at Bellevue Square Mall, we decided to find Spooky Forest at Timberlake Park. Unlike the previous two, the clues for this letterbox were written in a story-like manner, and not straightforward at all. Maybe Kenji and I are just not creative enough in our thinking to figure those clues out. We think we found the spot where the letterbox is supposed to be... but either that's not the hiding place or Spooky Forest has gone missing.

But our trip to Timberlake Park wasn't a total bust. It's definitely a cool little park to hike around in - lots of interesting lumpy, moss-covered trees to see, and there's a little man-made cave (which we believe to be a part of the Spooky Forest clues).

After we decided to give up on Spooky Forest, for no particular reason I decided to check around the bottom of another tree - like the cave, we think this tree was part of the clues, though not the actual hiding place. Around the back of the tree I found a little cubby hole, and sure enough when I looked inside I spotted a little package containing a stamp and a logbook. It wasn't until we were about to stamp our logbooks that I realized this was not Spooky Forest but a different letterbox - Big Ride - that we weren't even aware of. :)

UPDATE: I got a response to the message I sent to the keeper of the Spooky Forest letterbox. She says that the tree we thought was the hydra (the hiding spot of the letterbox) was not the hydra. So we were looking in the wrong spot.

Letterboxing Bust!

This morning Kenji and I took a road trip up to visit my friend Chris (a.k.a. Topher) who lives in Middletown, Connecticut. After having a nice lunch, we drove down to Haddam in search of some letterboxes that are hidden along some hiking trails (I don't know what park they are part of as we did not use a main entrance).

Anyway, on top of the facts that trails are not very well marked and the clues not very clear, there was a nice layer of leaves freshly fallen off the trees which made it difficult to identify which way the poorly marked trail went. Oh and because it's almost wintertime, we didn't have a whole lot of daylight to play with anyway, so we thought perhaps it would be better to try this lot of boxes (there should have been six altogether) in some other season.

But while the letterboxing was a bust, the hike itself was not. Along the trail was this cool abandoned stone house. We went inside and explored. There wasn't much there, and we had to be careful walking around inside as the floorboards were all rotting away. Anyway it was fun.

Burger Night Letterbox

Here's a stamp I carved for a letterbox that I planted a couple weeks ago. It's planted behind the bar at Joe's Place in Union, where on many Mondays Shoe Changer Joe and friends meet for burgers and just to hang out. Every now and then Kenji and I join them.

This image is from the piece of paper I used to design the stamp. On a letterboxing venture with Shoe Changer Joe, we stopped for a late lunch at the Tropicana Diner in Elizabeth. They had a pretty good picture of a burger on their menu, so I took a picture of it. Later on I printed the burger picture, darkened certain parts of it using a pencil, and then transfered the image onto an eraser which I then carved.

Anyway the piece of paper has been lying around the house adding to coffee table clutter, and it's time to get rid of it. So that's why I took a picture and posted it here. The End. :)

Um, and I just thought these were silly Crate & Barrel decorations...

So what the heck are these green things? We found them on the ground next to the trailhead located at the Iron Hill Museum in Delaware. We were out hunting a letterbox of course.

Anyway, I've seen the artificial likeness of these strange fruits... we sold them at Crate & Barrel as decorative things to put inside a centerpiece bowl. I always thought they were tremendously ugly. I also always thought they were made-up fruits. But I guess they are real. Either that or the folks at the Iron Hill Museum in Delaware like to shop at Crate & Barrel.

China Shipping Line

After wandering around the shops in Chesapeake City, and watching the little fire department parade, Kenji and I went letterboxing. I mentioned before that there are six bridges that cross the Delaware & Chesapeake Canal. Well, there are also six letterboxes planted alongside the canal, each carved in the image of one of the bridges. Two are hidden on the north side of the canal, and four on the south.


We took this picture of the China Shipping Line ship from the north side of the canal. We also saw several other large cargo ships pass by today. We found all six bridge boxes, as well as another box hidden at Lum's Pond, which is also on the north side of the canal.

Hitchhiker!

Shoechanger Joe is going on vacation for a couple weeks - to France and Scotland!

Now that I've gotten him into Letterboxing, I've made my first "hitchhiker" letterbox. Joe will plant it alongside a regular letterbox that he will find in either France or Scotland. Then the next person to find the letterbox that my hitchhiker is hidden with, that person will take my box and re-hide it alongside the next letterbox he or she finds. Once my letterbox's logbook is all filled up with stamp impressions, I will make arrangements to have it sent back to me.

At least that's the plan. Of course it could always get lost somewhere along the way. That's why I thought I should take a picture of it now. I got the pink button on top from my grandma's button collection. The kitty cat bead is something I bought a few years ago when I was making little containers out of beads. I became bored with making those containers before
I ever got around to using the kitty cat bead.

An Irish Blessing

After finishing the hike with Jason and his friends, I drove a little further into town to find a place to eat. My plan was to go find the letterbox hidden at Ringwood Manor, and I thought perhaps I should grab a bite to eat before hand. So first I went to the little New York town of Tuxedo, where I ate at a busy diner where they had good French toast. Looking out the window of the diner, I learned that gasoline in New York is at least $0.50 more than it is in New Jersey.

Anyway, after lunch I found my way to Ringwood Manor, which is just a few miles back over the border on the Jersey side. I should have read the clues for An Irish Blessing more carefully before I got started. For some reason I was under the impression that this would be a quick find. I didn't even change back into my hiking boots, which would have been nice since was tromping around in the woods wearing my sandals.

The hike was really nice though. The manor grounds are pretty with interesting things to look at, like a reflecting pool and sculptures of creepy looking beasty chicks.

There's a little lake, next to which is a graveyard I guess for the people who used to live in the manor way back in way-back times. For some reason I like graveyards, especially when you can see water from them.

Since it's been so warm so far this fall, there has been very little change in leaf color. So here's one of the few examples of fall foliage I found - the picture doesn't convey the color as well as it looked in person, and I can't quite get it right in Photoshop, but it's pretty close. Oh well.

So the hike and the hunt ended up taking about an hour and a half altogether. I could have done it more quickly but I was having fun poking around the graveyard, and then when I was just about ready to find the letterbox, I had to sit real quiet for several minutes while waiting for other hikers to pass by. Sera and Doobie carved a real pretty stamp, so yeah, other people should go find it. :)

Three finds!

After we got home from the baseball game, I called shoe-changer Joe to see if he'd like to join Kenji, Tiffknee and me for steak and/or chicken cooked on the grill. He couldn't come over, but he did tell me that he went letterboxing today and found the letterbox Kenji and I planted. He reported that he was the third person to find it, which means he did not get the little stegosaurus I put in there as a "first finders" prize.

A letterbox and a milkshake

Tiff, Kenji and I went on another little letterboxing adventure last weekend. We found one planted in the Watchung area not too far away from Route 22. Then we drove out to Bedminster to the Far Hills Pharmacy, where this cute pink ice cream stamp is hidden under a desk in the back of the store. After finding the stamp, we went and root beer floats and ice cream sodas.

They had a cute little froggy journal with unlined pages, so I got one for Tiffknee so that she could start collecting letterbox stamps, making the ice cream cone her first one.

After Titusville

On our way back from Washington's Crossing I took advantage of Joe's Bench for a few minutes rest. Mostly I did this because I wanted to have a picture taken of me sitting on a bench that says Joe's Bench on it. The bench does not belong to our friend Joe, but if he ever reads my blog and sees this post, maybe he will be amused for a half a second or something.

After sitting on Joe's Bench, we stopped for a bit and took a walk out onto Firemen's Eddy. Well, I guess we didn't walk out onto the eddy itself, but rather onto the jetty that creates the eddy. Some folks were out there just lying or reading in the sun. It was a beautiful day for it - nice and sunny but not too hot.

We returned to Lambertville, but before we put our bikes back into the car, we rode north for a bit in search of a particular letterbox that is supposedly hidden near a railroad trestle. The clue is not written very well, or needs to be updated, or most likely, both.

We didn't have any luck finding the letterbox while riding through on bike, so we returned the bikes to the car, drove and parked nearer to the letterbox location, and tried again on foot. We were unable to locate the path that was supposed to be 32 paces after the mammoth tree. But reading the clue further, it sounds like you eventually end up walking over the railroad trestle. However, there didn't seem to be a path to the left immediately after crossing the trestle, and even though we checked around in the general area anyway, we still had no luck. But it was fun to walk over the trestle. And as a result of hunting for this letterbox, we also got to see through the underside of this waterfall, which isn't something you normally can do with waterfalls. I guess the canal is raised through this part, and water overflows from that into the stream below. So anyway, while we were unable to find the letterbox, I don't consider the effort to be a complete bust. :)

More Letterboxing

Yesterday Kenji and I took Tiff on her first letterboxing adventure. She didn't have a stamp, so we let her borrow a smiley face stamp. We found two letterboxes - one next to a river in Linden, and the other hidden at a bookstore in Clark.

The bookstore letterbox was our first urban letterbox. It had a tiny stamp and instead of a log book, it had a two or three-foot length of register tape rolled up inside a small magnetic key box.

The most challenging part of retrieving and replacing this letterbox was being able to do it without anyone looking. When Tiffany and I went to replace the box, a woman was standing RIGHT NEXT to the shelf where we were supposed to hide it. She was reading a book, and didn't look like she was going anywhere anytime soon. So I did my best to invade her space, pretending to be intensely interested in the books on the shelf right beside her. It took five or ten minutes, but she finally gave up and decided to go somewhere else!

Aiea Letterbox Doing Well

I was chatting with my friend Dave from Hawaii. He said he checked up on the letterbox I hid along the Aiea Loop trail a couple years ago. He said it's still there and in good condition. He also added a little Spongebob Squarepants toy to it as a surprise for the next person who finds it. :)

Thanks Dave!

A Bright Idea

I made a letterbox today. I'm going to plant it in West Orange somewhere because that's where Thomas Edison lived. Also, West Orange has all those light bulbs everywhere all over town.

The name of my box is A Bright Idea. Instead of a log book, I made a log box. It's just a little box that I filled with a stack of little square pieces of card stock. I carved the stamp from an old eraser, and included a yellow ink pad and one of the pens that Kenji's mom decorated. Now I just have to figure out where to hide it!

The Snake

After pigging out at the pancake house, Kenji and I went to Franklin Lakes to Lorrimier Sanctuary, where "jerseyhikers" recently hid The Snake.

The box was hidden on July 2, 2007, so I was hoping maybe we would be the first finders, but we were not.

Just Another Errand

In spite of today's heat, this morning I decided to have a little fun while I was out running errands. In between mailing some packages at the post office, dropping off books to donate to the library, taking all of our empty containers, shredded and un-shredded papers and cardboard to the recycling center and food shopping, I did a little bit of letterbox hunting all by myself.

Today's box was located at the Essex County Environmental Center in Roseland. It was a very easy find, but took a lot longer for me to retrieve than it should have. The box is hidden in a tree that is in plain sight from the parking lot. When I first surmised which tree to look in, there was a car parked directly in front of it, not more than 25 feet away. The driver was in the car, and he was facing the tree and me. So I wandered around the walking trails for a bit in the hopes that this person would leave. By the time I returned, he had. It occurred to me that if anyone did see me, they might think it was drop for drugs or even better, national secrets!

It appears I'm the first person who's found this letterbox in nearly a year. The last dated entry was from August 2006. The stamp is a hand-carved image of a tree, and the keeper of the box includes a yellow and a green marker so that you can make the tree two colors when you stamp your book.