The Pepe's & Davidow's Letterboxing Site

Well - it's Thursday night and we are preparing to leave for vacation in VT for the next week at our second home at Mount Snow. Our sons are staying home [Steve has a summer college course and Matt has work.] Sue and I will be leaving early Saturday morning alone for the first time on vacation in 22 years!! Guess what we plan to do besides canoeing? You got it! We have planned a day in mid Vermont - the Killington area letterboxes as well as a day in New Hampshire to do the southern boxes. It's amazing how far we will travel to letterbox!!
Hope you all have a good week and check back with us June 10th or 11th for our vacation update. Hope the weather stays dry. I put the new Letterbox Poll up for you to amuse yourselves with in the next week!
If you haven't checked our our Gerbil Gathering photos, courtesy of Swamp Yankee, see our Letterbox Photo Album.
And don't be afraid to sign our Guest Map, right below the Photo Album - I know you want to place a push pin on the map with your Letterboxing name - come on!

I have just check the What's New on the Letterboxing North America website and find the new Mapsurfer's box, Gang of 8, placed on Saturday, May 17 in CT. Could this be the "dictator's" sub-hitchhikers we found at the gathering and the evil that was discharged from Pandora's Box Hitchhiker? Check out the clues - do we have to replace them? And what are the unique, one word clues that we found on each of the sub-hitchhikers? Not to worry; Leader of the Pack, MusicWoman and Mark & Sue are on the case! Brian & Lori from TeamGreenDragon, contact us - we need your help!!!!!

Visit our Letterbox of the Week, Time Travels by TeamGreenDragon. After beating Brian out with 5 more Legerdemaine Dictators, the least I could do is give him this peace offering. Besides the wonderful hike, you get 6 more of TeamGreen's famous stamps for your logbook. The stamp images are based on the Children's Illustrated Edition of H.G.Wells, Time Machine. Located at the Blue Hill Reservation in Milton, MA, TeamGreen suggests that you purchase a trail map, bring plenty of water, wear hiking boots and allow enough daylight for this 6 letterbox hike.

I have posted 4 Photos from the CT Gerbil Gathering. They can be found by clicking the last item in the left column of this page, View Our Letterboxing Album, then selecting the CT Gerbil Gathering Album. Thanks to Swamp Yankee for taking the photos and allowing us to post them on our website.

What a weekend!!
Let's start with the Gerbil Gathering on Saturday, May 17. About 50 letterbox enthusiasts showed up for this great event that featured a wonderful event stamp, "table o' hitchhikers," 10 Presidents, Aaron's Birthday Box, Red Sky at Night, Mystery Gathering Box and many other boxes! May the gerbil rest in peace - he really knows how to throw a funeral! Thanks to JustBeth, RTRW, Rubaduc, Bookworm, Chuck and Donna et al. It was truly the event of the year. One of the surprises was a guest appearance by MapSurfer [Randy]. It was very exciting to see a letterbox pioneer! Sue and I had a chance to renew some old friendships and create many new ones! JustBeth said that it's amazing that we were all strangers to her when the day began, but we parted as family.
Speaking of JustBeth, I got the scoop on the Presidents Series. Beth has several done and they will be issued in groups of 5 until all 41 Presidents are represented. Sue & I had a great time letterboxing en masse with TeamGreenDragon, MusicWoman, Sunshine & Swamp Yankee [Thanks for giving me permission to use the great event photos you took], Poppins, SLR in RI and Samantha. I can still see Brian's face when he discovered Legerdemaine's Stalin Sub-Hitchhiker to Pandora's Box. He volunteered [insisted] on taking it with him. We were all excited to have a genuine Legerdemaine's stamp in our logbooks!
Then it happened . . . Sue and I did the President's Series on our own. All of the rest of our boxing partners had already done them in the morning. TOO BAD! We found 5 more of Legerdemaine's Sub-Hitchhikers to Pandora's Box: Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Saddam, Osama! All of these dictators were almost one after the other. We left the Pol Pot hitchhiker for the next group but Sue couldn't convince me to leave any more. They were coming home with Mark! I can't wait for Brian to read this! If only he wasn't so anxious to leave us and do the Dancing Men Letterbox, he too would have had 5 more dictators in his logbook!

Sunday found us boxing in Mansfield Center, CT which is in that letterbox-rich part of the state! We found some great boxes with wonderful stamps, mostly done by Leader of the Pack. As we were stamping into the Plane Spotter box, who should come around the corner of the building but Leader of the Pack! Carolyn was at the historical society working on a 3 dimensional display of Mansfield Center's old historical buildings. Sue and I got an early preview of her work and the other displays that she had done celebrating her family farm's history. The farm has been in her family for 9 generations, since 1772. Her children are the 10th consecutive generation to work on the farm, which spreads over 1000 acres and has 500 dairy cows. She invited us to her home for her house letterbox and we exchanged with her children. She then brought us to her Got Milk letterbox on the farm and we all enjoyed the beautiful vista that was before us that stretched as far as the Foxwoods Casino. I took a picture of Carolyn and Sue with this wonderful view in the background and will put in on the website as soon as I develop the film. Thank you Carolyn for the tour, your hospitality and the exchanges with your children. We will take you up on that offer to box together in a few weeks. After leaving Mansfield Center, we stopped at MusicWoman's home for her house letterbox. This was a very full day! This is such a wonderful community of people.

Well, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. We started the weekend off at a gathering, reached and passed our 100th Find on Saturday, received a personal tour of Leader of the Pack's farm and visited MusicWoman at her home on Sunday. It doesn't get any better than this!!!!!!

Our new Box of the Week is the Tree of 3's Letterboxes. Visit our Box of the Week page.

Sue & I had a great day boxing on Saturday, 5/10. We stopped by the Thornton Burgess Series in MA. Great stamps but box number 2 was missing but has been replaced on Sunday. Thanks to Team Green Dragon who was there last week and reported the missing box. We did manage to find boxes 1, 3, 4 and 5 but had to leave because of time contraints. We plan to find those we missed in a few weeks.

The Pepe's & Davidow's are looking forward to the Gerbil Gathering on Saturday, May 17. Rubaduc, rtrw, Bookworm, Chuck and Donna and JustBeth are the sponsors. The gathering will take place at noon at Hop Brook Lake in Middlebury, CT. Hop Brook Lake is located on Route 188, right off of Exit 16 on I-84. Food, raffles, hitchhiker exchange, event stamps are all on the bill for the day. Hop Brook Lake is home to the 2 President's Series and Aaron's Birthday Letterboxes - a total of 11 besides the special Gerbil stamps. Pray for the sun to shine - if not, there is a covered pavilion, Meadows Shelter, which also has electricity for all of those wonderfully-filled crock pots. Watch for signs and flags once you enter the park. It looks like a letterbox-alicious day is planned for all!

I'm sure by now you are all aware of the new Letterboxing North America website. The webmasters have done a terrific job of transition, despite a bug or two. We all appreciate the countless hours spent keeping this site up for the betterment of boxing! Thanks so much and know that we all appreciate this herculean task that really is the impetus behind the growth of this pastime.

What a great letterboxing day the Pepe's & Davidow's had today. We all went to the Cape and despite the blustery weather, we found the following: Wizard of the Waves, Cook's Tour, Nauset Light, Fort Hill, Oyster Pearl, Joshua's Pond, and Andrew's Birthday Party. The 3 Sisters letterbox eluded us, and the 2 Sisters [Sue & Leslie] were truly bummed. They counted and recounted paces, steps and everything inbetween. We all decided that The Fort Hill Letterbox in Eastham, MA was probably one of our most favorite - the location is just fantastic!! We will place the pictures from today's letterboxing in our Photo Album once we get our film developed - I know, old school! I need a digital camera!!!
Be sure to visit our latest Letterbox Poll of the Week - It relates to unfound letterboxes!!