After last week's mini-adventure, my son has been bit by the boxing bug just as much as I have. Also, I had asked my folks down south if they had ever been boxing, and if there were any really awesome boxes we absolutely must find next time we're down there. They had never heard of it, so they did some research, and have now been bit too. :)
For Agent X, getting to go was a reward for good behavior this week. At first, he didn't want to get up this morning - Saturday is our usual sleeping in day. But as soon as I said, "So, what happened to going letterboxing this morning?", he hopped right up. I gave him the choice of looking for Guasco, or going to River Legacy and finding Haunted by Waters and Cowboy, or the Four-legged Friends Series.
Since I just carved his sig stamp the other night, he was anxious to get to use it on his very first find. Since several of the choices were listed on AQ as unknown, he decided that he wanted to go to River Legacy, so that we had a better chance of finding at least one that he could stamp into.
Once we settled on going to River Legacy for our hunt, I set about writing all the clues down - for the series, Haunted by Waters and Cowboy. And, Agent X started getting impatient, so I set him to getting together all of the supplies we were going to need. Even though I told him to pack 4 bottles of water, he had the wonderful foresight to pack 6.
We got a very late start - 11ish is already getting pretty hot in Texas at this time of year. On our drive to the park, we decided to go after the series and then if we still had energy afterward, get the others on our way back home.
We got to the park and set off on the trail. It was a beautiful walk. Nice and shady. There were several little well-beaten trails off of the main trail that led off into really nice little areas. Some had benches, some had really pretty dragonflies, some had absolutely gorgeous views of the river.
The kiddo did a great job while we were on the trail. He pointed out several really cool spiderwebs, and a lot of dragonflies. He figured out which plant kept leaving little sticker seed-pods on our jeans. He had a cool butterfly land on his leg while we were stamping into one of the boxes. He did a great job as a look-out, and I think that his uber-friendly Hello's to everyone we saw actually worked well to have people not think twice about why we were sitting on the side of the trail.
At one point, he was looking behind a tree for a box, and leaned on the tree since I had warned of oncoming noxers. Part of the tree promptly fell off into his hand, revealing a mass of termites underneath, and he ran out back onto the trail with a speed I've rarely seen in my child. The oncoming noxers of course had heard his "AAAACCCKKK!!!!", and they had a nice chuckle with us about it.
On our way back to the car, we found a really cool turtle sitting on a retaining wall. We sat and watched it for a while. Agent X figured out that every time we moved quickly, it would pull it's head in further because he was getting scared. During the rest of our walk back, he made sure to warn every person we met about the turtle and asked nicely for them to not scare the turtle. It was really cute.
We had such a great time. We only found three of the seven in the series, but it was such a beautiful walk that the kiddo didn't even care we didn't find them all. He was just thrilled that we had found any of them. We were so exhausted by the time we got back to the car that we decided to go home for the day. Two and a half hours in the Texas mid-day heat is about all I can take nowadays.
So here's the summary of today's lessons learned in letterboxing:
- More water is good.
- I have to remember to actually pack an extra bag just for trash; we MUST encourage Agent X's desire to better the trail by picking up litter.
- Bug spray should never be forgotten. There were way too many mosquitos feasting on my arms today.
- Although it's smart to keep all the letterboxing related stuff together at home, it's even smarter to have the stamps, ink and logbooks easily accessible in the pack. I got awfully tired of opening up the whole thing by the time we reached the second box. Moving everything we were actually using to a front pocket of the bag made it not only easier to stamp up, but also made it easier to trick noxers into thinking I was digging for bottled water.
- I really need to get some printer ink. Writing out that many clues took forever this morning, which of course just allowed outside to heat up even more.
Rogue Artist
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