We never thought we would ever be able to walk from Longbourn to Pemberley, let alone in a single day. The lure of Bucks Co. and the Jane Austen Series by Clueless made it all possible.
RGBisMe & I decided that the posting of Pride and Prejudice letterbox was enough enticement for us to make a 3+ hour trip to eastern PA. A perfect morning, our hike started at 9:30 am. We followed the clues without a hitch to the first of the Pride and Prejudice boxes. A quick bagel snack as we enjoyed the view and we were off to the next. The trail started to get busy just as we re-hid the second box. We loved the log books and stamps for both of these boxes. The First Finder's certificate made me start to cry; we were thrilled with the care and artisty put into it, little things mean a lot to us. It was at this point, we agreed to only seek boxes from this series so we could stay focused and make sure to get them all if we could.
As we drove to Emma, the skies began to darken. Donning rain coats, RGBisMe got our bearing and off we went onto the trail. We enjoyed one of the counties many land marks and walked on as it started to rain. By the time we reached where the clues refered to "Emma seated here with her parasol", it really let loose and we too opened our parasol so we didn't have to "hood" our PDA as much. We grabbed the Emma box and dashed all the way to the car to stamp up. Very cool stamp!
In another part of the state, Lightnin Bug, Tony Tony Chopper and Janila of Team Little Dog were boxing up a storm. Between planting and finding multiple letterboxes, they gave us a few calls via cell phone. They let us know that they were first finders for our Bowery Mission letterboxes and we were pleased to hear that they had enjoyed themselves.
Next was near a town we had been to this with Tracdc and wished we had time to again wander the groovy little shops. I should like to retire there and read tarot, poorly, to the masses. We had no problem following the clues to the Persuasion box and stamped up as we enjoyed the surroundings. We lunched in the car spooking around the area for a bit.
Jane Austen's box was next. Poor dear Jane had not been visited in almost a year! The last visitor had stamped in 4/24/05 but this box, like all we had found so far, was in great shape. What a charming stamp and great area.
We didn't always drive the most direct routes, we enjoyed a lot of the county. Using coordinates from geocaches that were in the somewhere in the same area helped us navigate to the some of the letterboxes but it wasn't always helpful. On the trail to find Masfield Park, we took a wrong turn at one point on the trails but got back on track after wandering a bit in a really neat area. We stumbled onto a place we recognized later in the clues then it took us no time to find the box. It too was dry and doing well.
Going for Northanger Abbey box was our biggest challenge of the day. We were getting a bit tired and silly as we acted out the clues along the trail. I gave RGBisMe a lot of grief because he was not properly reining his horse. The clues did not lead us wrong on our final box of the day. The blue lidded container was exactly where it should be but was sadly open and the log ruined. It was not muggled, but the container was not chewed, just opened and the log chewed up. No stamp was to be found or we could have just replaced the log with a new one. We gathered the entire remains and brought them home. We can barely read Hikers & Hound's last entry in September of last year so Clueless has decided it must totally be replaced.
We are sorry to share this bad news about the last box. We did have a wonderful time with the whole series and hope others can visit them soon also. We know it is not perfect form to hint where hitch hikers are but we were so pleased with our Mr. Darcy HH that we left in one of the boxes that we needed to share his photo.
We gave Janila a call as we were starting to drive home. It happened that she was stopped at a McDonald's ahead on our next turnpike exit. We pulled off and shared the highlights of our expeditions. Meeting up with her was icing on the cake of one great day.
