Well we are finally back - yesterday was a brutal day of travel and I
got in about midnight, feeling quite fried. I am forseeing a nap this
afternoon! By crazy coincidence Amanda and Ryan ended up being on my
flight from London to Philly - they'd been trying for a week to get on
a flight (stand by) and they finally succeeded.

We have lots to tell and Ryan is working on his Great Adventures with
all the gruesome details, but for a quick synopsis of the Dartmoor part
of the trip:

-- we did find our 100 boxes to merit the "patch" and inclusion in the
Dartmoor 100 Club (I think our final count was somewhere around 140 -
the weather was really terrible, otherwise I'm sure we would have found
more)

-- we did make it out to Cranmere Pool - some other hikers were there
that day (not letterboxers) and they were impressed that Americans had
managed to find it all by themselves (I guess many Brits have
difficulty finding this location). There was snow on the ground but at
least the skies were clear

-- we did meet God! At the gathering on March 26, we had the privilege
to talk to Godfrey Swinscow, the unofficial president of the Dartmoor
100 club that doesn't really exist.

They play this game very differently in England, and I have to say, now
that everything's said and done, I prefer our way better. The whole
artistic element of LbNA is missing over there - virtually nothing
there is hand carved. Many of the stamps are commissioned at shops, so
at least they are personalized, but the designs are fairly boring.
About half the boxes we found were store bought, generic images that
some kid put out there, so on that front we were pretty disappointed in
the quality. It was fun in a way to just wander around on a tor
looking under various rocks to see if there was a box - we had very
little luck in finding boxes using the triangulation coordinates
provided in the Dartmoor clues. Occasionally we would figure it out,
but the box would be missing. We did much better simply scrounging in
likely places. We did eventually acquire "box vision" where you could
tell from 100 paces whether there was going to be a box under a
suspicious pile of rocks.

We went to a "pre-gathering" at the Railway Inn the night before the
big Clocks Changing event, and that was way more fun than the actual
event itself, which can be described better as a zoo than an event.
But at the pre-gathering at least you could sit and chat with people.
However, many attendees were only interested in getting stamp images
(didn't matter how crappy they were) and very few ever even mentioned
their trail names, so we don't even know who we met. They do not
exchange personal stamp images like we do - you get their "traveller"
instead, and many people have several travellers. We did manage to get
to know a few nice folks, and Ryan was able to promote his Atlas Quest
site (although I'm not entirely sure if they grasped the concept - it
was a fairly low tech kind of crowd). We were a bit of a novelty,
being the Americans - most of them did not even realize that
letterboxing has taken off over here. Also we found out that there are
other hotbeds of letterboxing within the UK, but it is still a mostly
WOM activity. I think one person said there are about 1,000 boxes in
the New Forest, which is a national park in the south-central part of
England. It would be cool if some of those clues could eventually make
it onto Atlas Quest.

We did our part to plant boxes there too. I think I put out 5 on
Dartmoor, and then another 6 or 7 in other parts of England (mostly in
Cornwall). Gotta work on those clues, although I doubt they'll get
much traffic.

So what's going on with the Sonoma mini meet & greet? I can bring
pictures and logbooks from Dartmoor to it if anyone wants to see them
(I get the feeling DSaj is frothing at the mouth at this prospect!).
Glad everything seems to be okay here on this list!

-- Princess Lea