Southern Hospitality

I made a trip last weekend to spend time with my sister. She moved to the Greenville, South Carolina area years ago, after getting her nurses training. She was there a year or two when she met a Southern Gentleman, and they married. They were married for twenty some years when cancer struck. He fought the disease for at least five years, and he wouldn’t let us “mourn” him while he was alive. When we would try to pity him or try to coax him into eating, he would come back with a comment such as with his dry sense of humor, “oh no thank you, that might give me cancer.” You would really need to have known him to understand his humor. He is sadly missed by all of us. November will mark one year my brother-in-law has been gone.
More on a selfish note, I timed my trip to spend with my widowed sister with a letterboxing event that was to take place the same weekend. I have only been to Ohio LB events and really didn’t know what to expect. So with this in mind, I was a little anxious to say the least. There was No need to have worried. Arriving at the event site, with their Southern hospitality, we (RGang made the trip with me) were welcomed into the fold. We spend the day exchanging signature stamps, deciphering personals, and hunting for traditional letterboxes. Table Rock is a beautiful park, as is many of the other parks here, and worth a drive and hike through. That evening another event occurred called “night boxing”. Now, I was not too familiar with this “beast”, but decided to plunge in. That was an understatement! The night boxing event was all conducted in a creek. (Crick or creek-however you want to pronounce it) The hostess had implied that we would get a “little” wet. Holly lies! We were drowned! Okay, not really, but we walked waist high (until I fell in), so needless to say we were soaked.
After the night event, I returned to my sister’s house and she saw the mud and yuck and made me change outside and then go take a shower. I felt like a kid again! We had a good laugh and she said, “I’m going to have to check out this letterboxing thing”. I guess I’d do just about anything to put a smile on my widowed sister’s face.

Fireworks and the Fourth

Our weekend consisted of taking a trip to Richmond, Va. Richmond is a beautiful city adorned with statues and monuments. We did get several Letterboxes while traveling throughout the city, and enjoyed seeing Hollywood cemetery with Presidents Monroe, President Tyler and Jefferson Davis interred here. This is a "must" city for anyone interested in American history.

A short hour and a half going west can take a person to Charlottesville, Home of President Thomas Jefferson or East to Norfolk, home of one of the largest Naval bases.

National Road through Ohio

Today I went on a letterbox excursion on The National Road or what is now called U.S. Route 40 and originally referred to as the “old pike". In the 19th century it linked the east coast and the western frontier. It started in Cumberland, Maryland in 1811, reached the Ohio River in Wheeling, W.V. in 1818, and eventually made it to Vandalia, Illinois in the 1830's. The National Road opened the Ohio River Valley and the Midwest for settlement and commerce, and that it did. Thousands of people poured into the Ohio Valley to stake a claim. The two most common vehicles they used were the stagecoach (which could average 60-70 miles per day) and the Conestoga wagon (which with a team of oxen could travel about 15 miles per day). Along this National road mile markers were set to let travelers know how much farther they had to go to get to where they were going. (Also, when the little ones yelled, " Are we there yet?" They could yell back, "What did the marker say?". Many of these mile markers can still be found in Ohio, and some have been reset and preserved by the Ohio Historical Society.

Why Stamp and Ink You ask

I started Letterboxing a couple of years ago, because I like puzzles, the outdoors, art and history. Now, you are saying to yourself, "what the heck is a letterbox?" Well, I can tell you. A Letterbox is made up of a rubber stamp and logbook. The stamp and log are placed in a small (waterproof) container and hid from the public eye in some place that is accessible to other letterboxers. Then clues are posted via internet, and with lots of luck and patience the letterbox is found by other letterboxers. After finding a letterbox, I use my INK to get an image from their stamp and I stamp an image of my signature STAMP (which is an image that I use to identify myself) in their logbook. Therefore, I do not travel without my Stamp and Ink.

Letterbox clues can be found in many places on the internet, but the largest websites are LBNA.com and AtlasQuest.com.