Hello World!

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 write a 500-word journal entry about it each week. To challenge ourselves, we could only repeat topics once, so for a 16-week course, we would have 8 different activities we tried. I can't really remember any of the activities I did except one, and the reason I remember that one is because it turned into a full-time hobby.

I remember being a kid and finding letterboxes with my cousins. The first was in 2006. It was an Octopus foam stamp, and I used an ombre ink pad to stamp it into a kid's pink journal with princes Fiona in human form on the cover. After this find, my mom got sick. we didn't letterbox again until 2009 when we found two boxes and 2010 when we found two more. The last letterbox we found in 2010 was the last box I found before getting back into the hobby in 2018.

I wanted to make homework easier on myself, so why not do an activity I've done before? I looked on LBNA and found a letterbox not too far from my college campus. I called my mom, who lived 20 minutes away and she picked me up and we went to find the box together. The letterbox we went to find was called "Princess Rose". It was a foam stamp and being able to find it was a REALLY good feeling.

It was not long after that I discovered Atlasquest.com, the Speedball carving gouge, and a cheap classroom-grade carving material that I has shipped to my dorm room. the first image I carved was a heart and a Sun (because my last name was Loveday) and I hid it in the park behind my house which was connected to the WO&D trail. As time went on, I became more and more comfortable with carving and would go letterboxing any chance I got.