A dialog between Sky, the letterboxer, and Dgauss, the geocacher, on the relative merits of their respective hobbies.

(Late one evening)

Sky: You know, we could cooperate a little more on letterboxing and geocaching. They’re really more alike then they are different.

Dgauss: How’s that?

S: Well, they both get us out of doors, hiking, biking, going to scenic places we might otherwise miss.

D: True, but they are different. There’s the whole .org vs. .com business, that is, no ads on letterboxing but marketing allowed in geocaching.

S: Maybe on the surface. But I’ll bet we’ve seen more ads in letterboxing; for instance visit my stamp shop – or a recommendation to a nearby café.

D: And those recommendations have led us to some excellent meals. I suppose there’s not much difference there. But, the main challenge in letterboxing is wading through all the verbiage to get to the essential details of the location.

S: Letterboxing hints are just more literate. Whereas a GPSr will lead you by the nose until you’re right on top of the cache. What’s the challenge in that?

D: Hmm. They’re not that good (yet). Often once you’ve found the general location the GC hide is more of a challenge. In LB, they practically give the exact location away.

S: That’s a generalization. A lot of the LB hides are tough. What’s the toughest hide you remember?

D: That would be all those we haven’t found. Though the coolest was the one shoved up the tailpipe of a motorcycle in California.

S: That was a letterbox! On Florence Avenue, in Sebestopol. Remember all those clues regarding Batman, that led to the street with all those metal sculptures in the front yards.

D: Yeah, Batman. That’s real literature. I knew reading all those comic books would come in useful someday. Besides Florence, what’s the best art that we’ve encountered?

S: That would probably be the Lewis and Clark murals in Whitehall, Montana.

D: That was a geocache! Touche.

S: Point taken. But we could cooperate more.

D: You mean like you could quit borrowing the batteries out of Maggie?

S: Okay, if you agree to close Paddy firmly so the ink doesn’t dry.

D: It’s a deal.

(next morning over a second cup of coffee)

D: Good java. I was thinking. You’re right we could merge letterboxing and geocaching. Just put a rubber stamp in each geocache and publish the coordinates of all the letterboxes.

S: We’d need to get geocachers to read “Please do not remove stamp” though. Remember the log found in our letterbox, “Took funny looking stamp; left two batteries.”

D: And they were nearly dead. You know, I don’t think letterboxers are so great with words after all. Remember after our first few letterboxes, we thought having at least one error in the clues was part of the game. Such as left for right or north for south.

S: We should make a letterbox in which all the clues are backwards. Remember for a while we hesitated going after first finds. You wanted to wait until they got the coordinates corrected?

D: What could we do? Make a hitch hiker sleep in a travel bug hotel?

S: Maybe. But why don’t we make a letterbox/geocache hybrid?

D: Let’s do it.