We haven't been letterboxing as much lately because right now there aren't any more boxes in the area.


The closest box we haven't already found is north of Battle Creek at Turkeyville. Turkeyville is a former turkey farm that turned itself into a turkey-themed tourist attraction. It has a restaurant (and dinner theater!) that serves nothing but turkey dishes, which doesn't do much for this vegetarian, and it also has an ice cream parlor, which does.

We went to Turkeyville last week (Sunday, July 24). It was terribly hot, nearly 100F. The clues for the box were quite vague (I really don't like it when they don't at least tell you what it's hidden in -- whether it's a tree knothole, a brush pile, under a stump... because otherwise you have to tear up the whole area looking). We didn't find it. If it hadn't been so hot, we might have been willing to put a little more effort in, but we couldn't take it any more. We did eat some delicious ice cream (a "wishbone sundae," which turned out to have a halved banana arranged like a wishbone on the side of it).

Besides the Turkeyville box, the next closest boxes are all clustered in Battle Creek and Ann Arbor, both about an hour away. We decided to go to Ann Arbor on Friday, so I selected two boxes that were on the same side of town, "Northeast Ann Arbor" and "Hachiko." The former had us starting at Clague Middle School, but led us through some eerily silent suburban areas and into an unexpectedly rustic park. There was something a bit creepy about it -- the park had a semi-abandoned look to it. Unfortunately, not realizing we would be going through dense woods, we hadn't worn insect repellant, and suffered for it. By the time we found the box, Lucky's seasonal allergies were bothering him a lot, so we hurriedly stamped in and left behind the hitchhiker we've been carrying around for almost a month, "Feeling Sluggish." This box required the longest hike of any we've done.

Afterward we went to Arborland and got Lucky some allergy pills at Hiller's, as well as some treats and stuff to make a traditional British hotpot for dinner (Hiller's has a pretty good British grocery section). I assumed Lucky wouldn't want to bother with the other box because of his allergies, but he thought we should try it. So we went to Parker Mill County Park to get Hachiko. This is one of a three-box series memorializing famous dogs. Hachiko is the dog who used to wait for his master every day at the Shibuya train station in Japan. The other two boxes in the series are Strongheart and Laika, but those are further away in Northville.

When we arrived at the park we were warned that it would be closing and the gate would be locked at 8 p.m., which was in 45 minutes. We quickly followed the clues to the right area, but the last clue was rather indeterminate (it gave a compass reading but didn't say how far to go). I thought we weren't going to find it, but then Lucky suddenly uncovered it. For some reason it included three stamps -- one being the name of the box and the other two being pictures of Hachiko. It took some planning to fit them all on one page of my journal because they were pretty large. The stamps were very nice. Unfortunately, the box had no journal. Previous finders had left loose pages, and we tore up a piece of scrap paper to add a few more sheets. Someone else had written, "I wonder where the journal went?" We wondered that too. We have found boxes before in which the journal was filled up, resulting in the addition of loose pages by later finders, but we've never found one missing a journal entirely. A ne'er-do-well finding the box probably wouldn't steal the journal and leave the stamps. I wonder if someone made off with it by accident? But then, I'd think they would realize their error and bring it back.

Currently reading: The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, trans. by Jack Zipes.