Memorial Park Maintenance

Our Memorial Park event turned out to be a big success! Somehow I remembered to take a few photos after lunch so here is our work crew:

Joining the faces you may recognize is the Pratt family (PratFamily777) on the left, who discovered letterboxing two months ago. They also brought their adorable "baby" Cooper who made fast friends with Dragon Warrior (Alex). I have to admit I'm not much of a dog person, but Cooper was an absolute angel!

We started off with the usual round of exchanges and split up for the morning to check on different sections.  We regrouped for lunch shared our mud stories.  While the weather was beautiful Saturday, it rained enough Thursday night and Friday to make the trails a mess.  Some of the boxes required wading to reach them, and everyone had to navigate sticky portions of the trails.  We are proud of our mud!

After lunch we headed back out on the trails for the afternoon.  Somehow after lunch, most of the group ended up boxing together and this turned out to be a big help.  We found several boxes by pure accident just by having several people looking in the general area.  Our big find for the day was The Patchwork Girl of Oz.  It's home turned into a clearing (probably bulldozed) filled with logs and branches.  Can you find the box in this photo?

Let's make it a little easier.  Try this view:

Give up?  Ok, here is the answer:

Somehow Wry Me managed to spot the little corner sticking up out of the dirt. So she was our hero for the afternoon.  The box was broken and soaking wet,

but somehow the stamp was in great shape.  So we put it in a new box, added a logbook and moved it to a new and hopefully safer home.

When it was all said and done we had a great day with some great company!  I'd like to thank everyone who came, and Boots Tex who recently updated the Nada Clue series everyone enjoyed so much.  (and the new location is beautiful!). Thanks for playing in the mud and saving some boxes!

Memorial Park Information

Memorial Park in Houston is a significant part of Texas letterboxing history.  It was home to several events and at one point boasted the highest concentration of boxes in the state.  Sadly the drought in 2011 caused many of the park's pine trees to die, and the park is actively removing them and changing some sections of the trails.  On May 11, I'm hosting a small gathering of letterboxers to check on as many of the boxes as we can, update their status, and move any which are in danger.

Memorial Park is a delight for letterboxers and filled with boxes.  Don't expect to find all the boxes in one weekend.  It will keep you coming back for more with new suprises - boxes with high find count restrictions, mystery boxes, puzzle boxes of different levels, and others I can't talk about.  Many of these are there thanks to dewberry who hosted events and planted numerous boxes in the park.  So enjoy the park, and if you are looking for dewberry's boxes - she has very short steps!

Here are some link's to maps of the park:

Memorial Park Conservancy's official map - the best one for trails

Recent new trails - this shows some trails not on the main maps

Texas Mountain Biking map - this little map shows a trail around the picnic area that connects the green and blue trails.  This may be useful for the boxes around the picnic area.

I'll be consolidating the maps for the event next week and marking locations of as many boxes as I can.  Check back in a few days for more details.   

Letterboxing Lake Somerville

Last month I took a short trip up to Lake Somerville to get the remaining boxes which I missed on my previous trips.  By chance I camped at Nail's Creek State Park on the southern side of the lake.  By arriving on Thrusday night, I had my pick of campsites and I got a great view of the lake.

On Friday morning, I looked for PI Joe's Calvaryman box which is a decent hike even from the closest access point.  On my way back I heard a loud hawk nearby, and realized I parked right under the nest!

 

I continued on to Birch Creek State Park and picked up a few boxes.  In the afternoon I met up with NativTxn who lives nearby and spends a lot of time at the park.  She helped me find two boxes I missed, and we planted one of her newly carved stamps.  By the time we finished I had walked about 10 miles for the day and we headed back to our campsite.   We enjoyed the evening and exchanged some stamps at our picnic table.  

Saturday morning, NativTxn had to leave so I spent the morning finishing up a stamp to plant at Nails Creek.  I've censored the image so you don't get a spoiler, but you might notice all the colored pencils below...you will want to color this one in!

One of the highlights of the trip was waking up to a glorious sunrise over the lake.  So I'll leave you with some sunrise photos.  The one picture I should have taken was on the way home...there were hundreds of people on the roadside taking pictures of bluebonnets outside of Brenham!  They caused quite a traffic slowdown.  But back to your sunrise pics...

 

Shower Remodel, Weekend 10&11

Has it really been that long?  Well this tile thing is finally getting wrapped up.  I put in some serious hours to get things moving over the last two weekends.  First we finished all the walls and the little step.  This took lots of custom cuts for the corners and bottom which kept Steve busy cutting while I measured and put them up.  I also got the inside edge of the curb.  That took us up through last Saturday.   

I'm reasonably happy with it, but of course I notice every mistake!  Here is the inside wall.

Well I guess I should say we got most of the walls.  I still have this problem corner below.  I want the tile here to meet up with the tile we will put on the wall around the bathtub.  Unfortunately we need to get that planned out better.

So the next step was the floor, and that starts with laying out the tile and installing the drain - with help of course!

One thing you may notice in the picture above is how uneven the floor is where it meets the wall.  This is due to the Quick Pitch tool we used to help set the correct slope of the mortar bed.  What we didn't think about up front is that the longer plastic strips going to the corners make the corners higher than the middle of the wall.  You can either have a constant slope OR a level floor along the walls - not both.  So now the floor and bottom edge of the tiles don't line up.  But I think a nice thick line of caulk will take care of it.  And here we have the completed floor.

I still have to clean up all the excess thinset (the white stuff you see everywhere), finish the problem corner and curb, then grout it all.  So we still have a ways to go, but at least it looks like a shower now!