Back at the end of 2006 I was on one of my letterboxing websites chatting online with some friends here in the PNW. We were comparing who had found the most letterboxes in one day in 2006. The general conversation soon turned into the idea for a gathering that would pit two teams of letterboxers together to see which team could find 50 letterboxes in one day first. Since the site I was on uses a rat as its mascot, the Rat Race was born.
Since most of us participating live in the Portland area, we decided to have the race here and set Gabriel Park as our center and allowed any boxes within a 10-mile radius of the park to be eligible. Then we decided that no team could count boxes planted or found previously by a team member. That narrowed the list down a lot, let me tell you. We would have from the official sunrise to the official sunset to find 50 boxes. Some impartial judges and planters were brought it to keep things fair. 25 new boxes were planted specifically for this event so we knew there would be at least that many for us to find, and then each team chose 25 previously planted boxes to find.
For you non-letterboxers, finding 50 letterboxes in one day is a LOT of boxes. My personal best before yesterday was 23. That was a normal day of boxing with a bunch of friends in various places. I've done more than that at a gathering, but that doesn't count. All those boxes are in one area, so you don't have to do much planning or driving to get those.
Our race started at the official sunrise on 4/14/07: 6:27 a.m. That is the butt-crack of dawn, people, let me tell you. My team was the Pub Rats consisting of Happy Papaya, Ant Teri, Bookworm (me), Gerlfren, Der Mad Stamper (the one and only guy) and Raqs Enigma. My teammates were to meet me at the park, but they got lost ended up being LATE and we didn't find our first box until about 7:00. It was not an auspicious beginning.
I'll spare you the box by box description and move ahead to the end of the day. My team kept track of our finds on the back of Papaya's van window with that chalk paint stuff. I have to tell you that stuff is seriously cool. So here is a picture of the car at the end of the day:
Let me decode that for you. The ones in red marked with a "N" are the number of new boxes planted for the event we found. The ones in blue marked with an "O" are the number of old boxes we found. The ones in yellow marked with a "S" are the boxes we got skunked on, and the one ones in white marked with an "E" are the extra boxes we found but couldn't count for the race. In the end here is our tally:
New Boxes Found: 12
Old Boxes Found: 21
Boxes we looked for but didn't find: 4
Geocaches: 2
Bonus stamps: 2
Boxes we found along the way but couldn't count: 2
Our official count was 33 boxes. Unofficially, we found 39.
Other interesting happenings were kept track of inside the car.
Number of U-turns: 27
Number of Mini's spotted: 25
Number of boo boo's requiring first aid: 2
Number of times we had to send Der Mad Stamper back to the car to retrieve clues and the stamp: 2
Number of times we saw our lives flash before our eyes: 7
Sadly, we didn't win. Our rival team, Something Fierce, came in with 39 boxes, beating us only by 6 boxes. I never really expected that anyone would find 50 boxes in one day. The boxes here are just too spread out and require too much driving in between and hiking for boxes. That's okay though. We had fun and that was the main point.
Here are a few pictures I took.
This is a skid mark from one the best movie parking stunts I have ever been a part of. 40 to 0 in 10 feet. It can be done!
The whole team stamping in
A trillium in bloom.
We stopped at the Tualatin Hills Nature Preserve for a potty stop and got caught up in an Earth Day celebration. We all got some free juice or pop and free gardening gloves. This is our whole team with an Eagle (don't know who he was or why he was there, but hey, it made a nice photo op). The kid we grabbed to take the picture did a good job, didn't he? Oh, note my t-shirt here. It has the image of our team stamp on the front.
Really, really muddy feet.
All in all it was a great day. My calves are killing me today, but I survived. A good time was had by all!
Next year I want to be a judge. This was a lot of hard work!
2 comments:
Sounds like fun. How was I supposed to know you would post 3 times in one week? Usually it's 3 times a month
**runs and hides**
:)
It looked like cold, but wet fun. Did you ever figure out how far you walked?
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