During some down time on a recent trip to Florida, I introduced a friend,
RichBeau, to letterboxing. (RichBeau is a geocacher, too, so we logged 13
geocache finds once we exhausted the local supply of letterboxes that were
available to us as time and distance allowed.) Here's a report on the
letterboxes we found:

Disney Series -- We found all three with no trouble -- Caribbean Beach,
Celebration, Wilderness Lodge. A large owl watched us as we logged in to
the Wilderness Lodge box, which was cool.

Seven from the Florida Ancients -- We headed up to Deland and tackled this
series of seven boxes in a great little park. The trail was submerged in
several places, but we managed to find our way through it and the letterbox
series -- backwards. We startled a woodpecker on the path, and he flew to
the safety of a tall pine and yelled at us. Unfortunately, #5 and #6 are
missing (some others had noted this in the logs in other boxes in the
series). Worse:

#1, Swamp Owl, was open and filled with water.

#3, Clay Acorn, was wet throughout.

#4, Clay Fox, was open and strewn about the ground. Some of the log and
papers were chewed up, so it looked like a raccoon may have gotten to the box.

#2, Clay Dog, and #7, Clay Deer, were both in great shape.

A storm arrived about halfway through our hike, with winds and rain falling
as the temperature fell. We carried on, though, and dried out and rebagged
the wet boxes as best we could. (I'll email the box owner with a report on
these boxes.)

As we arrived at the park, one of the rangers saw RichBeau poking at his
GPS, and told us he had plotted the coordinates of the entire park, so he
gave us a map with his longitude & latitude bearings. Then he also pulled
out a notebook filled with large color photos of much of the wildlife and
fauna found in the park. It was a great introduction to the local ecosystem
(and also helped us learn about the poisonous snakes of the area, knowledge
that we fortunately never needed to use).

When we completed the trek, we arrived back at the park office to find that
the park's volunteer team was hosting a barbecue, and they invited us to
have some bbq chicken, cole slaw, smoked sausage, pork, baked beans and
homemade chocolate sheet cake. Since we were we pretty well soaked through
by now, from both the rain and the swamps, we eagerly dug in to the
delicious grub. It was a nice ending to this adventure.

We then headed back into DeLand, but the Cor Libri and Soda Jerk
letterboxes were both unavailable this Sunday afternoon.



|-#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#-|
Silent Doug, P22 F119 X04
silentdoug@douglasgerlach.com
http://www.letterboxing.info