The boys and I like to Letterbox. That’s what geeks do when they play outside. You may not know this, but hidden all over the United States, and many other countries as well, are watertight boxes that contain ink stamps and books. Go to letterboxing.org, find your state, county, etc, choose an adventure, print off your directions/instructions and hit the trail. My sons and I have been doing this off and on for about 7 years.
This last weekend, the guys and I decided we’d tackle the “Harry Potter series” hidden in the Overland Park Arboretum. It would be great. We’d knock out 7 letterboxes in one go. I printed out our instructions, we grabbed our stamps, books and some water and away we went. In the old days, when the kids were young, I used to do more prep work before we’d head out on a hunt, i.e. read over the directions, make sure the hike and search wouldn’t be too hard, etc. But I’ve got big kids now, 10, 13 and 15. What could thwart us in an Arboretum?
Gathering at the Visitor’s Center we perused the instructions for the 1st box. Half of them were in code. A Vigenere cipher to be exact. Yeah. I had the same blank look on my face. We grabbed a site map, hoping to be able to reason out enough of the clues so we could find the box without having to decode the cipher. After 20 minutes of tracking down one path then another it became pretty clear we needed those coded instructions.
That’s when we thought of the iPhone.
Within a minute we’d found a Vigenere cipher website. We typed in the gobblety gook, provided the key word (answer to a Harry Potter question) and hit “decrypt”. Ta Daa! There were our essential directions. We were on our way.
Until we weren’t. We had to take a compass reading. I scrounged through our pack even though I KNEW there was no compass in there. That’s when my oldest said, “Mom. There’s probably an App for it.” He snatched the iPhone out of its mesh pocket and, yes, found us a compass application from the App Store. And it was free. Onward we go!
The iPhone compass sent us deeper into the forest. Further from other hikers. Which was lovely, because that is why we saw the deer. You can see them too because the iPhone has a pretty good camera (for a phone). As the sun lowered and we grew weary, the iPhone gave us one last treat. A call from home. Kevin (my husband, their dad) said dinner would be on the table in 1/2 hour. Awesome. According to iPhone’s GPS, we could make it in 20 minutes.
So it was a good weekend. A grand weekend. But it could have been crap! Want to turn sad kids into glad kids? The iPhone’s got an App for that, too.
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