Well, we've finally decided to try to get some of our old letterboxing clues in order during the spring “stay at home” order of the coronavirus pandemic of 2020. Since it doesn't look like we will be getting our old WPI website back anytime soon after all, we hope to transfer a few more of our clues over to Atlas Quest, even if just for “historical purposes”or if we are able to check on some more of our local boxes to update their status as time and conditions permit.

Anyway, now it seems that this old Easter Quest of ours from 2000 could actually be considered our very first letterbox plant ever! We never even thought of listing it as such before, not even on our old WPI website, because it was planted for only one day on our own property, just to share with former family members as an introduction to the concept of letterboxing, and back in those days that would not have met the conditions that were then being set down for actual letterboxing in North America, i.e. that North American letterbox clues were to be available online freely and unrestrictedly to anyone who wanted to look for letterboxes at their own leisure on publicly accessible land, presumably for as long as the boxes lasted, and not just for a day or two!

Well, things have certainly changed on the North American letterboxing scene since those days, with some of the newer folks even insisting that there are “no rules” for letterboxing at all, and that letterboxing is whatever they want it to be! ;-) This, of course, has lead to some of those stamp gathering parties in people's backyards and such that we we have always considered to be detrimental (or these days possibly even “lethal”) to the true spirit of letterboxing on one's own time schedule over wider areas of public land. However, we figure if some people nowadays are listing that type of planting as “traditional”, well then we suppose that we can certainly do that for a few of our old boxes as well!;-)

And, yes, this particular Easter Quest box of ours was an early example of just that type of “private stamp party” box that got to have some much larger repercussions! Letterboxing in North America was still in its infancy back then. We had only just stumbled upon the Valley Quests up in Vermont a few months earlier (followed by a handful of Charlestown Quests and a couple of Jay Drew letterboxes), so we actually thought that clues were supposed to be written as poetry! So, we cut a little trail in the woods behind our backyard, planted a letterbox with a stamp in an old boot along the trail (and, yes, chocolate bunnies and eggs to be found along the way, too!) and then wrote a poem of several stanzas for the clues, which we actually came across handwritten on a sheet of paper while cleaning out an old letterboxing junk box just the other day!

Anyway, the kids seemed to enjoy the “egg hunt”, but the one who really took to the idea of letterboxing with a vengeance was my former sister-in-law Trish. She had never heard of it before, but seemed so taken by the idea that she immediately went back into our kitchen, plunked herself down at our table and started making a list of all the trails where she wanted to put letterboxes in RI based on the “Magic Tree House” books that she was then reading to her young children. We almost thought she was going to take over all the trails in the whole state in that first overwhelming outburst of hers, but fortunately we were still able to find a few trails left to later plant some of our own boxes on that she hadn't already “claimed” on that fateful Easter day at our kitchen table!

Well, like for so many folks, It seems her initial bout of enthusiasm for letterboxing fizzled out after a year or so, while here we are still simmering along in the hobby even after twenty years, but who could have guessed that this first little private letterbox hunt of ours could have produced such a spark for early RI letterboxing history! And now that we've re-cleared the old trail in our back yard, perhaps we may even open up this search again to friends who may visit in the future, that is, if they have any interest whatsoever in letterboxing! ;-) We'll see…

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