Letterboxing with AdventurousAcorn

My husband and I consider letterboxing "our thing" so when we decided to go to the Smokey Mountains this past weekend, we committed ourselves to spend one day of our trip letterboxing. When looking for letterboxes in the area about a month ago, when we were planning our trip, it was pure coincidence that a letterboxing event was being held just 30 minutes away from where we were staying! We (in particular me) were excited about the opportunity to meet some new people that don't live in our area. We are very fortunate to live where we live and to have the letterboxers, our friends, that live near us. Going to events is my favorite part of the hobby, and if I hadn't discovered events, I probably wouldn't have kept letterboxing. Going to events makes letterboxing feel more like a community. The opportunity to meet more people sounded great to me! The event was also a great opportunity to bring some old stamps out of the box to share with new boxers! I brought two old

  .... Well, I guess technically it was, but let me explain. Geocaching.com is a larger and commonly recognized community by public standards. It's platform is not intended to be secretive and if you've ever met a geocacher, you know that they live and breath their hobby. Don't get me wrong, I've yet to meet a letterboxes that was the same way, but the geocachers are their own animal. Before I even knew about letterboxing, I was geocaching with my mom and dad. The first Geocache I found was with my dad in the mountains of Utah in 2005, I believe. My dad is a geologist and has a knack for adventure, so he when he first heard about geocaching, her was quick to find geocache and we were in the jeep driving to it. I was so young that I don't really remember that many details about the process of getting there. I do, however, remember finding the box. It was an old ammo container hiding under a log and there were trinkets in it-- not geotrash as is commonly found now. I

In my earliest days of letterboxing, we were just "The Loveday Family." We used a store bought stamp, probably from a Micheals Arts and Crafts Store. It was a cartoon frog that was skipping and leaping in the air with a huge smile on his face. I don't remember the exact story of how we selected this stamp, but I imagine it was more of a hand-me-down than a decision. My mom, at the time, was teaching first and second grade (multiage) at Mantua Elementary School at Mantua ES in Fairfax, VA. Her classrooms theme was frogs, and EVERYTHING was frog themed. She has frog stickers for her students, frog stamps, frog number lines, frog books, even a frog themed Box Top holder. I believe this frog passion stemmed from the frogs we had in our aquarium. Anyway, this stamp was used on her students papers, so it was multi-purposed for letterboxes. We letterboxed rarely in these years, but the frog was the best symbol to symbolize our family in this time period. We used a lime green ink

When I got into letterboxing, it was the spring of my freshman year of college, and I was majoring in American Public History and was considering minoring in recreational management. I had big dreams of becoming a historical park ranger at Independence Hall National Park. at that time, I was considering a minor in Recreational Management and decided to take an elective class on Recreation and Leisure. This class was anything but leisurely.  The most ironic part of this class was reading textbooks on leisure instead of experiencing it. It did however have the easiest final that I ever took. We had to try a new leisurely activity and present it to the class. My cohorts were very excited when I decided to practice cake decorating (something that I wasn't good at all. I guess we all start somewhere) and brought in a remanence of a cake with red and green decorations because I was reusing leftover supplies from Christmas. For this class, we had to do something leisurely for an hour and