Sorry,folks - this is not a mystery box, but another hitcher story.
Delete if necessary. Hopefully, however, telling this story will
explain some of the recent bad karma in our area and will clear the
air of those remaining noxious little fumes!

Just about a month ago, when hitcher complaints first surfaced on-
line, little red faced stamps with tongues sticking out and the
words "the Hitchhiker Kidnapper strikes again HAHAHA!" began popping
out at some of our boxes. Since we already knew that the person who
started the complaining had found and taken 3 hitchers from our boxes
in December, when 3 red-tongued hitcher kidnapper faces appeared at
several other of our boxes on Feb.15th, and the very next day, we got
a report of that person finding 6 hitchers at her last 10 boxes, we
assumed we had found our red-tongued culprit!

Well, so much for assumptions. We feel just terrible that now it
turns out we may have been suspecting the wrong person all along!
We also feel terrible that people we had formerly trusted have
apparently been willing to let someone else take the rap for their
own intentionally nasty behavior for almost a month now! At least
when WE make a mistake or unwittingly hurt someone else's feelings,
we try to make a correction or explanation as soon as possible!
I guess, despite undergraduate degrees in psychology and human
services, certain aspects of human nature will just always remain
puzzling to me!(I suppose that's why I don't work in those fields!)

Anyway, I'm glad that this whole red-tongued episode has turned out
to be not something truly pathological, as we had feared, but more on
the order of garden variety resentment or jealousy. Now perhaps we
can get back to putting out the Burlingame area boxes we had felt
obliged to temporarily remove, and to cleaning up some of the trash
deposited recently near some of our box sites. Sorry that this recent
vandalism has already unfortunately affected quite a few folks. We'll
let you know when the problems seem to have been resolved.

Meanwhile, we're off to the "sunny land of no letterboxes" for our
annual desert hiking expedition. Hopefully, when we return, the
climate here will have improved as well, and we can get back to
updating all those joyful travelers!

Wanda