Well, am I ever delighted to be able to report that I reached my F
10,000 goal a few days early! ( I decided that I'd better get it done
before April Fool's Day just so that no one would think it was a
joke!) Anyway, Pete and I went out after church last Sunday afternoon
to finish up a few letterboxing "loose ends" remaining for us in RI.
Monday I had a dental appointment, plus volunteer work to do at
church ( rearranging the big floral arrangements to bring smaller
bouquets to shut-ins in nursing homes and such), so I decided to make
Tuesday my big "CT wrap-up boxing day". I'd already done pretty much
all the nearer CT boxes, so I got an early start to the "other side
of the river" to make a big sweep through Wallingford, Woodbridge and
Naugatuck. By hiking over 20 miles that day on various trails in
different areas, I finally got all the boxes along the Beacon Cap
ridge, plus many more!

That evening back in RI at Polish Club, I asked one of my friends
there (now known as "Hibiscus" for the prevalence of that flower
everwhere we went last year when I first introduced her to
letterboxing in Florida!) to join me the next day for a quick swing
through Cape Cod. We got a rather late start, but picked up quite a
few boxes out there Wednesday afternoon, bringing Irene to F100 near
sunset at "Wychmere Harbor" in Harwich, and me to F9999 at "Holidays:
March" nearby! I was going to leave F10,000 for the special
commemorative box that Pete was planning to plant for me back in RI,
but Irene and I stayed over at a motel in South Yarmouth, so the next
morning we just had to go out to the nearby "Year of the Dog"
letterbox! "Archimedes' Screw" did such a wonderful job on this
stamp, logbook, and story (including the symbolic meaning of the year
as a time for less selfishness and increased social awareness of the
less powerful among us) that I was absolutely delighted to have this
box as my 10,000th find!

So, afterwards we two "old ladies" in our 50's and 60's swung up high
into the air like happy children on the nearby swings! Then we went
down to the Dunkin Donuts and onward up the Cape for a few more boxes
nearer the shore before heading back towards Hyannis for our
celebratory Chinese lunch at the Cape Cod Super Buffet - our
traditional letterboxing favorite! We even got to meet up
with "Archimedes' Screw" later that afternnon after school to tell
her how happy we were with our letterboxing adventures, and then we
headed back to RI while viewing an absolutely gorgeous sunset and
playing loud polka music - what a blast!

So, once again I just want to thank everyone who made this
accomplishment possible. I think it really is a big deal for North
American letterboxing, not only to have a supposed 20,000+ plants
listed as available to find "on-line", but to actually have a real
live person who went out "on trail" and found over 10,000 of them -
and has the many many books full of stamps to prove it! Actually, I
could have said that I reached F10,000 quite a while ago, if I
counted all the multiple stamps in boxes, partial boxes, boxes listed
as missing before either of us could find them that we searched for
anyway, hitchers we found multiple times, etc., but I prefer keeping
count the way we describe in an interview done with us several years
ago ( see "About Us" on our webpage), so I'm just really glad to be
finally reaching this landmark number now!

Thanks a bunch,

Wanda from RI
P163 F10012 X1105