A Letterboxer’s County Fair

Plans are coming along nicely for the MI Fall Gathering. The location has been finalized and this year we will be back at Pigeon Creek County Park in West Olive, MI. I was a little hesitant about going back to the same place another year, but it’s hard to beat the great enclosed lodge and wonderful trails. But just because this year’s event is in the same location as last year’s event, don’t think it will be the same ‘ol thing!

The year’s event theme is “A County Fair” and it promises to provide lots of old-fashioned family fun with themed boxes, food and activities. In addition to purchasing clues with tickets, attendees will have the option of participating in a variation on the cakewalk game, a traditional carnival favorite.

Although we are working hard to develop the carnival theme and atmosphere, in keeping with the tradition of the MI Fall Gathering, the day will be for the most part unstructured. With the exception of an early-morning group activity and the noon potluck, the rest of the day is open, leaving plenty of time for exchanges, socializing and hitting the trails in search of the event boxes.

Complete event details are available at AtlasQuest. Stay tuned for clues and information on how to earn extra tickets…

Carving at Camp

Today was day #2 for my letterboxing interest group at camp. I have a group of 12 girls, ranging in age from 9 to 15. Yesterday, after a brief overview of what letterboxing is and examining the contents of a letterbox, everyone chose a trailname and then designed a stamp image onto an eraser. Today we carved. These girls are great! I was a little nervous as to how the carving would go (and had nightmares of finger gashes), but they got the hang of it right away and several of them carved extra stamps while waiting for the other girls to finish. There were some very creative trailnames and also stamp images. We finished today off by decorating a small purchased logbook with markers and their stamp images. So now they are equipped to letterbox… well almost…

Tomorrow we will be learning what exactly a pace is and how to use a compass, including a little compass exercise that will end at a letterbox I placed for the activity. Then on Thursday we are out on the trail, putting it all together and talking about some of the responsible aspects of letterboxing while we make our way to the box — respect for the environment, leave no trace, discretion and replacing/covering the box when done.

And that will wrap up our little 4-day mini course in letterboxing. The girls are having a lot of fun and we’ve had some onlookers from other sessions wanting to know if the letterboxing interest group is offered next week again.

LB Interest Group

Next week I will be leading a letterboxing interest group at camp. The group will run in girl’s camp for a 4-day session, 1 hour each day. I’m planning to go over the basics — what it is, how it works, tools of the game, etc., come up with fun trail names, design and make personal stamps and a small logbook and then on the final day, go out and find a letterbox that I have pre-planted. The clues will use some of the more common letterbox clue strategies, including compass bearings. I’m trying to come up with clues that draw on camp history and tradition and will require the girls to do a little research the night before — since they don’t have access to computers, it would have to be things they could find out by asking staff members and/or alumni. It would be fun to each create a box for the other members of the group to find, but that would take more time than we have — maybe that’s letterboxing 203. I am considering putting out a couple of additional boxes that they could look for outside of the group, maybe during their free time.

Of course being on camp property, these letterboxes are not available to the general public. But hopefully it will spark some interest and send a few kids home to get their families involved with letterboxing. Should be fun!

Yubotu (aka Battleship)

One of my favorite games when I was younger (hmmm, maybe a candidate for my contribution to the Childhood Games Series the Monkey Mama’s are doing in West Michigan) was Battleship. Remember the colored little boards that opened and closed like little laptop computers — although at the time we had no idea what a laptop was or what one would look like? Each player positioned their fleet of little plastic destroyers, cruisers and submarines onto their grid and then proceeded to try and sink the opponent’s ships by guessing the correct coordinates. My brother was good, very good, and he beat me more than the other way around — which is probably why I kept playing… the challenge of trying to beat him.

So, this isn’t exactly letterboxing related, but it kind of is since I came upon the site a few months ago while doing research for a letterbox I was creating… I think my search terms were ship and logic and maybe game or puzzle. Anyway, it doesn’t matter how I ended up there, just that Google took me to the DKM Software site, which has several online games you can play for free. They have a great online version of Sudoku, but the most exciting offering is a game called Yubotu, which is basically a computerized version of the old Battleship game in which you use logic to try and deduce the location of the ships the computer has randomly placed in the grid.

As if I didn’t already have enough online diversions, what with Flickr and Etsy and last.fm and all of the websites and blogs I read and my recent addiction to Facebook Scrabulous (shout out to Stargirl here) and assorted other time-sapping amusements, now I am addicted to Yubotu. There are 6 new puzzles each day, ranging from Beginner to Advanced, none of which are really all that difficult, but are fun all the same.

At the moment, I have no idea how I could ever work this into a letterbox clue, but believe me, I am working on the possibilities.