diary29c

Hello Miss James and Pre-Primary kids!

Thank you for answering our questions. Your park looks very pretty and the aquarium looks like fun too. Maybe someday we'll be able to visit Australia and see these places ourselves.

We want to tell you about our new hobby called letterboxing. (We could not find a website for letterboxing in Australia, so the link is for New Zealand.) Letterboxing is like a treasure hunt where you follow directions to find a box that someone has hidden in a special place. Inside the box, there is a rubber stamp and a log book. You also have a rubber stamp and log book of your own. When you find a hidden letterbox, you stamp your own log book with the stamp from the box, and you stamp your personal stamp into the logbook of the letterbox. Then you hide the box back in the same place for someone else to find.

Katie and Brian's favorite part of letterboxing is when they actually find the box. Katie's mom's favorite part is following the directions because they usually lead you through very beautiful places like parks and forests. You can see some of those places in the pictures below.

Thank you so much for allowing Kid Koala to spend time with us. We enjoyed having him visit and we loved learning things about Australia. We really do hope our family can visit your country some day!

If you look closely, you'll see the blue lid of this letterbox hidden under a rock. This letterbox was at a park along the Royal River in Yarmouth, Maine.

Katie, Brian, Kid Koala, and their friends from Maine find a letterbox hidden near a tree. This box was in a graveyard with some gravestones that were over 200 years old. The graveyard also had a wonderful view of Casco Bay in Portland, Maine. The second photograph shows us stamping the logbooks.

Most of the letterboxes we find are in plastic containers. It was just like finding a treasure chest when we found this gold and silver colored metal letterbox. This box was near the Forefathers Monument in Plymouth, Massachusetts. The monument honors some of the Pilgrims who first came to America.