Activity

A mystery letterbox is an excellent activity that’s done outside and is fun for all ages. This makes it a great family fun activity. Not only does it let you be out in the fresh air, it also exercises your mind by wanting to solve a puzzle.

If you just aren’t familiar with letterboxing, it is a hobby of sorts. It going on the moors of England and today has spread on the U.S. and also other aspects of the world.

Basically, a letterbox is really a container you discover outside somewhere. A common destination to hide them is in parks on trails.

What’s inside this mysterious container? Simply this: a log book, a rubber stamp, in most cases an ink pad. Yup, that’s the plan.

What your are doing is collecting stamps. The stamp inside the box usually represents it. So a box along the trail to Mt. Washington would probably be a picture of Mt. Washington. Most of the stamps are hand-carved by whomever hid the box, so they really are pretty intricate and unusual.

When you’re ready to attempt to locate one of those boxes, first thing you need to do is lookup and listing clues that can be entirely on a web site. Then away you go. You bring together with you your individual logbook and your own “signature stamp” to display you. This stamp can be hand-carved.

When the therapy lamp is located, you’re taking the stamp from the lamp and stamp it into your personal logbook. Over time you collect hundreds and in many cases a large number of stamps. But you also stamp your own signature stamp in to the book that lives within the box. This shows that you’re there. It’s lots of fun to look over the comments from all of the people who have discovered that one box.

So do not know mystery letterbox completely different from a regular one? Well, for ordinary boxes, the “clues” are really directions. They let you know where by to go to find the therapy lamp. For instance, the clue might say “Take the skyline trail, in the first fork go left, in 10 steps look behind the 3-trunked tree on your right.”

But a mystery box requires more of you in order to find it. These boxes are little puzzles that have to be worked out. So because of this, they are great if you wish to give the kids difficult. And there’s anything satisfying than obtaining a letterbox you had to solve a clue for.

Here’s a sample. My husband and I are big Harry Potter fans. One letterbox on Cape Cod was hidden the morning one of the Harry books arrived. The clue contained instructions based on something through the series.

One step said to find the pond named after Colin Creevy’s brother. Then count the amount of words to the first book if this first mentioned where Mr. Dursley works and do certain calculations on that number, etc.

When we found the lamp, the stamp inside would be a hand-carved image of Hagrid with Hedwig located on his shoulder.

So as you have seen, finding a mystery letterbox might be a great deal of fun for the entire family. To locate mystery letterboxes, go to one of the following websites:

:

Click on Search for Boxes.

Select your state.

For the city, put an issue mark.

Click on Search boxes.

:

Under Letterboxes within the top menu, select Simple Search.

In wall mounted letterbox titled Area Search, check “Include only mysteries.”

Select your state.

Click on Search.