615. Wanda & Pete's F 50,000+ Pumpkin
Just a little memento of our past letterboxing efforts now turned into yet another (gulp) "personal traveler"!

Just thought we'd resurrect this little pumpkinhead that we once used as a bonus stamp at one of our annual southern RI fall gatherings many years ago. That was way back when we were very happy to be reaching the milestone of 20,000 letterbox finds back in 2008, so it was a simple matter of changing the first number on that old leftover stamp from a "2" to a "5" to bring us up to date for reaching over 50,000 letterbox finds by the end of 2015 … and, of course, with over 600 plants and 2600 exchanges, PFX 50,000+ much earlier that year as well!

Yes, it seems that we can definitely say that we are the folks who have been letterboxing pretty continuously longer and harder than anyone else in North America by quite a long shot! We started out in the late 1990's when there were only a few dozen letterboxes planted around the entire country, so it was very slow going those first few years, and we really had to travel around and hike a lot to find our first 500 boxes. Things have certainly changed in the "letterboxing world" since then, to the point where nowadays, even in our "semi-retirement from letterboxing stage", we often find over 500 letterboxes in a single month, and have been averaging 4,000 to 5,000 letterbox finds annually for quite a few years now, even without exerting anywhere near the effort of those earlier times! However, we're still basically "quiet types", who don't do facebook, don't list our finds publicly for "Hall of Fame" or whatever, and only rarely attend gatherings anymore - since so many of them seem to have turned into mere excuses for collecting vast quantities of stamps (sometimes even in the same old repeat venues just with different stamps - gasp!) Anyway, we're still in the hobby for the thrill of adventure, of discovering new places, (re)visiting wonderful trails, and getting into the "hunt" itself , not just acquiring more stamps! So, it was with some sadness that we learned recently that some newer folks to the hobby actually thought that letterboxing was just about stamps! Some had even been to quite a few of what we call "stamp collecting gatherings", had swapped stamps in the mail, done talk list chatter or whatever, but had never even heard of us as letterboxers and had never gotten out on their own to do any real letterboxing at all! Hopefully this little pumpkinhead can change that situation, at least a tiny bit, by encouraging more people to explore the vast number of possibilities for real letterboxing adventures that are out there - even if so many of the wonderful boxes that we found over the years are now long gone, but hopefully there will be many more still to come...

Anyway, to get this little pumpkin personal traveler, just tell us what we count in our F-count. Easy answer: only finds!!! You could add "traditional finds" as a sort of inside joke, since before new people to the hobby started confusing actual finds with just plain stamps, that's all there were, at least in this country, where letterboxing itself was mostly about the hunt, and the stamp was only a little added bonus to prove that one had followed the clues properly to reach the letterbox site. It was only years later that AQ tried adding the word "traditional" in front of the word "finds" in a vain attempt to stamp out the confusion ensuing between the actual letterboxers and a newer generation that mostly did just gathering and "stamp collecting". To this day, we consider anyone who gets more than a very small fraction of "finds" from gathering days to be more of a "stamp collector" than a letterboxer, and we admire most those who just quietly go about the actual business of letterboxing, with no need for "stamp fests" or recording finds on-line or anything like that. We ourselves have always preferred to play the game that way, so that only the people who actually go out letterboxing will know who has been there, like a sweet little secret surprise instead of a "public as a frog" on-line flaunting. In fact, the only reason we finally listed 100 finds recently on AQ was because we just found out that there were a few people restricting their clues to only those who listed 100 or more AQ finds. But, just so there is no confusion with us, please note that, of our 50,000+ traditional finds, we do NOT include non-traditional unclued stamps like event stamps, multiples, "tabletoppers", personal travelers and such among those finds, and shame on anyone who thinks we do! (If we did do that, i.e. "count by the stamp" as some folks apparently do, we could literally add thousands of random stamps to our count, but then it would be an S-count, not an F-count, and we're very particular about always wanting to keep our "F" in mind while letterboxing!;-)

Copyright (c) Wanda and Pete. All Rights Reserved.

BEFORE YOU SET OUT, PLEASE READ THE WAIVER OF RESPONSIBILITY AND DISCLAIMER.