Day One, of the non-Eastern letterboxing trip

Our week off of work and dedicated (mostly) to letterboxing started off great. Left AA at 8:00am (amazing how a hobby will drag you out of bed on your vacation!) and were at the Michigan Hitchhiker Hostel by 9:00. It was a nice, hilly walk (where we ran into a dog walker stridently calling for his non-visible dogs to no avail. A few minutes later one came galloping down the trail and looked at us, slightly puzzled. We kindly directed him to his owner.) and found the box without a problem. We didn't have our own HH to exchange with those in the box, so we decided that these stamps didn't actually count as "real" HHs; which, since we had never found one, seemed fair but hard on ourselves.

Our next box was "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" at Bald Mountain. While we were on the trail, we ran into ISpy... our first on the trail encounter with another letterboxer! Unfortunately, we didn't think to do an exchange with her. We found the box (the stamp is great) and then had a laugh -- there was a HH inside! So we did get a "real" HH today, after all! It is the "Feeling Sluggish" HH which has been around since 2003. We are going to replant it somewhere later this week. We also chuckled over the last place the HH had been, which was the "Motown Wonder" box, carved for the 2005 summer GL gathering... and the place where "Ain't No Mountain" made its debut. Very zen-y stamp experiences today! :-)

Our third box was a bust. We couldn't find it. We are 99.9% sure we were in the right place, but we'll be sending an email to the owner of the "Friend in the Mountain" box to check on the story.

We were very happy with the boxing, weather, and stamps (especially the HHs) today... a great way to start our vacation!