We drove to Tumacácori NHP to attend a Member Meet Up of the National Park Travelers Club. We visited, got the Western Member Meet Up stamp, and took a group photo. The meet up lasted about 30 minutes and then we all moved on to the next event at the park.
The Padre Kino's Quest. This is a quest set up by the park mostly used for elementary school children to teach about the park. The quest has a booklet with clues and a bag with mystery tools. You go to an area in the park (designated in the booklet by letters of the alphabet from A to I) and solve the clue which leads you to a code to unlock a box with a stamp inside. You stamp that into your booklet to show you solved the mystery. This quest is right up a letterboxer's alley. We broke off into nine groups of 4-5 people. Then each group was assigned a starting point and off we went. We had a group of five - I Dig Toasters, Suffering Husband in Tow, Martini Man, Wisconsin Hiker and myself. We started at 'A' and began our quest. It took us a little over an hour to complete all nine of the challenges and collect the stamps. It was fun and a great way to learn about the park. Desert Flower arranged for us to do this with the park and she created a letterbox series for us to log in. Once everyone completed the quest we headed just a bit down the road to Wisdom's Café for some lunch. Our group pretty much filled up the entire place and the food was delicious. This was a great way to start the event weekend.After lunch Thomas and I along with Lee decided to grab a couple of letterboxes in the area. First we looked for Anza NHT: Hike by Desert Flower. This was a quick find once we found the place to park. After stamping and putting the box back in place we headed to the second box - Red Hot Chili Peppers by FamilyTreeShakers. This proved to be a bit challenging - we couldn't find a couple of landmarks at the beginning of the clues but then we got to a part of the clues that matched the location and then we easily found the box. We stamped in, put the box back in place and then headed out. Lee left to go get set up at his campsite and we left to go do some more letterboxing.
Thomas and I made our way to Catalina State Park not far from our hotel. We got a clue packet for the 15th Annual Tucson Gathering: Rodeo! event that is happening tomorrow from Wisconsin Hiker when we had lunch so we were able to start looking for the boxes today.
We entered the park, paid our fee and decided to start at the Equestrian Center to look for letterboxes. There were three series that started from the parking area. We decided to head to the Fifty Year Trail and search for two of the series - It's Rodeo Time by Waneta Wench and The Saga of Big Red by Martini Man. These two series could be found together as you went up the trail. But we goofed up and missed the first box in the It's Rodeo Time series and that got us confused. So we concentrated on the Saga of Big Red series. At some point I stopped and read all the clues in the first series and it dawned on me what we had done wrong. So we decided to look for that series on the way back down the trail. Once we got back to the trailhead we had found all 10 boxes (five boxes in each series) but it took us a couple of hours and by the time we got back to the car it was dark. But I was glad we got them done that way we would have more time for other boxes tomorrow.We left Catalina State Park and we were both so tired we skipped dinner and headed directly to the hotel. Showered and relaxed from a really great day it is now time to sleep so we have energy for the event tomorrow.
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