Wednesday, August 29, 2007

On the trails again

Well it was quite a long hiatus from boxing, about 2 years, a little less, but I have to say that now that I have been bitten by the bug again, it feels like I never left (except of course for the zillions of boxes and boxers I have never heard of, a lot can happen in two years!) So, the story of my reiinfection with this letterboxing obsession was sort of unusual. I went on a girls weekend to North Conway New Hampshire with some friends of mine, this was our fourth annual trip. Now I had previously told some of these friends about letterboxing, but this was years ago. In my 2 year hiatus it didn't exactly come up as a topic of conversation. Well, it just so happened that my friend Michelle whom I had told at least two years ago about the hobby, just started boxing this summer with her kids, and was really enjoying it. It also happened that she had been staying up North the previous week with her family camping, and just happened to have all of her letterboxing stuff in the car, including numerous clues printed out for the area. So I was game, usually these weekends are a buying frenzy when all the girls hit the outlets and do some serious damage shopping (myself included) and it seemed like a good diversion from spending money (one of the things I loved about the hobby to begin with). So we did a hike up to Diana's Baths with all of the girls, to call it a hike it really exaggerating, but it was a nice scenic spot, and while they cooled off at the baths I had to look for the boxes there, my friend had gotten them already on her family camping trip. So now with my new finds I was a little more raring to go. The other girls wanted to do some more shopping, but Michelle was game for finding some boxes she hadn't found, so we dropped the others off at the Inn where we were staying, and we headed out to Echo Lake to find two boxes there. We got to Echo Lake and started following the clues, we found Echo Gecko without incident, and were on our way to find White Horse Ledge. So we are hiking along, noting the notable things there are to see that are mentioned in the clues like an old car and the foundation of a sugar shack, and we are going along looking for a set of stairs that are up next in the clues. Well shortly I hear a sound, which I thought was possibly just Michelle behind me, or possibly, another hiker on the trail ahead of me. So I stopped to get a better listen, and then I saw it, a full grown Black Bear! It was on the trail ahead of us uphill and heading off the trail away from us. I alerted Michelle to the bear, which she couldn't' see as she had a boulder obscuring her view from it. I quickly asked her for her camera and proceeded to hike a little further uphill to get a better shot (do not try this at home!) Don't know why I felt compelled to do so, but I definitely had a weird adrenaline rush thing going on. So I snapped a few shots and we were on our way, the bear, who was well aware of our presence, was happy to see us go. So we decided to leave this box for another day, but one thing was sure, I was once again bitten by the boxing bug!

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