Our Family's Trail name ~ Team Awesomesauce!

This blog is going to be about our adventures with letterboxing. We just found out about this fun family activitiy and hope to find many letterboxes this upcoming Spring/Summer Season.

Friday, April 15, 2011

John Ball Park, Grand Rapids - Where the Wild Things are

For our second attempt at letterboxing we went to John Ball park.  This plant is called Where the Wild Things are and was planted/launched September 10th, 2010 by Angel Winks.  She did a nice job of incorporating the story of where the wild things are into her clues.

Here is picture of our quick made letterboxing kit - you'll need to bring your own ink pad, paper/notebook to collect stamp images, your own stamp, a pen/pencil for writing date etc. and a compass is helpful as well.

So At John Ball park we began to follow the clues that printed off from http://www.atlasquest.com/ I actually think I like atlasquest better - they have many more symbols that tell you things about the plant and if you register with them you can see the last person who found a plant, so this may give you a better idea if the boxes are still there or not.  This plant had been found on April 7th 2011, so we knew we had a good chance of finding them.

This person has hidden 5 boxes in a woodsy area of John ball park with a BIG hile you must climb - Our first instructions were to climb up 130 steps - THIS WAS A WORKOUT -  the girls loved it, then once we got to top of hill there were a few more directions to follow, go past a certain tree, take the trail to the East, find the doubletrunk tree and look for a tree next to it with many toenails to find the first box. (many toenails meant alot of exposed roots)  and we FOUND OUR FIRST LETTERBOX!!  I forgot to bring my camera so no pictures this time.  But it was very exciting, we did our stamping and then hid the box right where it was before ...

Onto the next clues, we were instructed to go by some more landmark trees and then make our way down a VERY steep hill that was covered in dry leaves, making it even more slippery - it was truely an ADVENTURE down the hill.  I said let's turn back this is too scary, we might fall -- but Tom and girls convinced me to keep going and we slowly crawled/slipped down the steep hill, making our way from tree to tree -- We made it to the bottom and then proceeded to find TWO more letterboxes, What FUN!!  We have 3 left to find there, but it was getting late and needed to get going --

My rating for the Where the Wild Things are Letterboxes at Johnball park - Not just a 15/20 minute walk quest, plan for a good hour or so to find all the boxes and be prepared to do some major hiking, climbing up ALOT of steps and trekking down a steep hill and I don't know what to expect after that...  It's a definite ADVENTURE and the boxes were fairly easy to find, we had to retrace our steps a few times, but the landmarks mentioned were all there - Great one for a family with older kids who are looking for something to do on a nice afternoon or evening :)

Here are pictures of two of the stamps we collected from this plant:
You can see we found Max and one of the Wild Things above.
The beginning of this week the weather was really nice.  Now it has turned cold, windy and rainy.  When the weather gets nice again we will go on our next adventure and I'll post about it here.  I will remember my camera next time :)

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