Family Outing: 2 for 1 Adventure in Raleigh, NC Oct. 11, 2009 Copyright Arladean Arnson Originally published on Triangle Mommies blog.

 

What to do? What to do? I have THREE “Flat Stanley”s that have traveled to our house from far afield that need to go home in the next two days. We haven’t done anything interesting at all in the time they have been visiting. And, my son really wants bring Daddy on his first Letterboxing adventure today, Sunday, the last day of the weekend.

 

Hey, I know what to do! I will jump onto the computer and find out if there are any Letterboxes in downtown Raleigh so we can hit the historical parts, take some pictures with the “Stanley”s, learn a little more about North Carolina, and take my husband on his first Letterboxing adventure!

 

Now, if you have read this far and have no idea what a “Flat Stanley” might be and you have never heard of the fantastic outdoor activity of Letterboxing, I congratulate you on your enthusiasm for my writing!

Flat Stanley is a book written by Jeff Brown and illustrated by Tomi Ungerer and published in 1964. The story is of a little boy that unfortunately gets flattened but sees the bright side of his predicament. He ends up being able to go around the world being mailed by letter. There is a string of stories to tell of his adventures.

This story was so popular that in 1995 a Canadian teacher started The Flat Stanley Project. This effort encourages children around the world to find out about each other through the mailing of paper dolls that either look like Stanley from the book or images of themselves!

My son and I received our three visiting paper dolls from a family of homeschoolers in Texas.

Now, what about Letterboxing? The easiest way to explain it is that it is an outdoor activity where a box or bag containing a notebook and a homemade stamp is hidden in a public place like a park or even a parking lot! To get the clues on where this box is hidden, one would log onto certain web sites that have them listed. Using the clues, the seeker finds the box, stamps his own notebook with the homemade stamp, leaves an imprint of his own stamp in the letterbox notebook, and then “reburies” or re-hides it for the next adventurer. Then, when the seeker gets back to the computer, he can log that he had found the box!

We started off our adventure by heading downtown to the NC Capitol Building. We walked around the grounds of the Capitol as we looked for the perfect place to take our “Stanley” picture. We stopped every once in a while to read the many and varied statues. Did you know there were three Presidents of the United States from North Carolina? Yes! But, I am going to leave you to look up who they were!

I noticed that a light was on inside the Capitol and I took a few steps to see if the building was indeed open on a Sunday. Yes! We were in luck. After checking in with security, we made our way around the building going up and down the staircases and peeking into rooms. I highly suggest a visit to the Capitol, especially if you are not from North Carolina.

Making our way out of the building and around back to our car, my son wondered if we were going to find any Letterboxes today or are we going to just hang around all the old buildings! Letterboxes were next!

There is a beautiful old and very historic cemetery right in downtown Raleigh and that was where the two Letterboxes were for today’s hunt. There are many other Letterboxes hiding in downtown Raleigh, but being October, I thought a trip to the Oakwood Cemetery would be just the place to get us in the spooky mood! Of-course, by day, Oakwood Cemetery is not spooky but a lovely garden where families actually bicycle together on a Sunday afternoon. We even saw a family flying a kite there too.

Following our clues, we started out for our first Letterbox. This first one was found under a bush and being held there by a white rock, near a beautiful old Oak Tree. The homemade stamp was of lovely oak leaves! How appropriate for our day in the “Oak City”! We left our mark, my son’s stamp of a little lamb, in the notebook and “buried” the Letterbox again where we found it.

The second, we found out, was very complicated, but we followed the clues in the car instead of by foot which would have taken us all over the southern part of the Cemetery! After a few minutes of circling around, we found the Camilla bush with the cute turtle nearby! We stamped our mark and gathered our treasure in stamp form of a flower emblazoned with an “A”. Hid the box for the next Letterboxer and drove out of the Cemetery happy to have found both boxes!

We ended our downtown adventure with a snack break at Krispy Kreme Donuts on Person Street. Of-course, this was another fine place to take a “Stanley” picture!

So the next time you have a quandary of how you are going to do two or three projects at once, remember there is ALWAYS a way to do it! We did it with a camera, a car, a Capitol and a Cemetery!

 

For more information on Flat Stanley by Jeff Brown please go to your local library or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Stanley .

 

For more information on The Flat Stanley Project go to http://www.flatstanley.com/ .

 

For more information on Letterboxing research it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letterboxing .

 

Or visit sites on Letterboxing: http://www.letterboxing.org/ and   http://www.atlasquest.com/ .

 

The official tourism site for Raleigh, NC is here: http://www.visitraleigh.com/ .

 

Krispy Kreme’s official web site is here: http://www.krispykreme.com/ .