an adventure awaits at the Southern Ohio Haunted Trails letterboxing event....
SOHT is an annual tradition, though this was my first year. The place is amazing! Tucked back in the woods in southern Ohio, near Chillicothe, on privately owned land, a wonderful mixture of log cabins, woods, trails, and fun greet each visitor.
Our hosts for the event, R-gang, really out did themselves, the theme was Ghost Pirates...and ghostly and pirately is definitely was! Just check out that pirate ship (there is actually a bridge under that ship that lets one cross the water.) This is one creative group...but wait, it gets better!
R-gang took time (probably LOTS of time) to plant letterboxes on the trails that run through their woods for us to find...complete with treasure map! That's right, a hand drawn treasure map! And how appropriate that the first letterbox the group I was with came upon was a treasure chest...the treasure? A letterbox of course!
My boxing group was so much fun. Jokes were flying, laughter filled the air (there might have even been some pee-in-the-pants moments ;) We all stamped in together, sharing stories, making cracks at one another, and even caused some mischief. hee hee.
The trails were filled with all sorts of Halloween and Pirate-y decor. Skulls and skeletons, treasure chests and swords, spooky characters and funny set ups. And twelve stamps to find along the way! And what great stamps they were...all going along with the theme.
In the evening, one trail was set up for night boxing...something I had never done before. I laughed so hard, in fact, I'm laughing as I think about it. :)I took a picture and it scared some of my boxing buddies, the young boys were jumping out of hiding places trying to scare us (and sometimes succeeding!) And then my group got the bright idea to hide in the dark, and wait on the next group so we could scare them....yeah, that wasn't such a wonderful idea.
We turned off all our flashlights, hid every part of white clothing we had, and, in the dark, tried to find a place to hide because the others were coming around the bend! Here we were, 4 adult women, hunkering down behind what we thought was good cover (mind you we found a place to hide in the dark,) and we waited.
Funny stories started to be told, and laughs and snorts started to escape some people...and then the other group came closer....we waited...and waited...waited a little bit more...
Then the group shinned their light in our direction and simply said, "Hi, guys, what cha doing?"
That's right, we didn't scare them. We weren't even hidden very well. Turns out we were all crouched down behind a sad little Charlie Brown tree...not really good cover. And we waited too long to jump out and say boo! So much for our masterfully contrived plan, eh?
Oh well, we all had some good laughs out of it!
After night boxing, there was time to hang out by the campfire before hitting the tent, or camper, or in my case, the back of the Blazer for bed.
Tomorrow there would be a wonderful breakfast, where last minute stamping and exchanging could take place, and then the goodbyes said as we parted, all looking forward to next year's SOHT event.
2 comments:
We went letterboxing this weekend too. But yours looks like a LOT more fun! Maybe next year I'll take my eldest son and my father to this event! They're both really into letterboxing. You can see my dad's blog: http://www.1sgblog.org/
Wow, that is deja vu! At the end of my first week of LB'g, I saw that there was a LB'g event in Nag's Head, NC. I was living in Rodanthe for the spring/summer
2007. So I attended the event mainly to see if there were a bunch of weirdos who did this hobby or what. I met The Red Cat from MN and the R-Gang sisters, all of who were perfectly normal, LOL. I see the sisters are still going LB'g strong! Yeehaw!
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