Penwood State Park

We had a fun family day of letterboxing yesterday at Penwood State Park, in Bloomfield, CT. The old farmland that makes up this park was donated to the state by a local conservationist. It's a beautiful park, with fields, ponds, and lots of woodland trails to explore. We set out to find 4 different letterboxes, and after over 2 miles of hiking and an afternoon of exciting discoveries, we were successful in finding all 4.


Zoo Boy checks out a bridge across the outlet of a pond before starting off on our adventure. The weather was just gorgeous -- mostly sunny but not too warm (and not too cold -- a big change from the weather the past couple of weeks!). He ditched that over-sized sweatshirt pretty quickly once we got hiking.


An old spring house along one of the old woodland roads we hiked. There were several springs in that vicinity, all lined with old field stones. Obviously they've become a good habitat for frogs, as evidenced in the next photo:


I'm sort of glad The Map Man didn't take a picture of what I had to do to reach this frog in one of the springs! It was ENORMOUS! And only one of some really wonderful wild critters we ran into at the park. At one point, while working on stamping at a letterbox, a deer came out of the woods right towards us. She was very curious about what we were up to, and hung around for quite awhile, despite the fact that we were talking and trying to take her picture (nothing came out clear enough to post). Eventually she melted back into the forest, and we headed down the trail to our next destination. We also saw a flying squirrel, which The Map Man made pop out of it's hole in a dead tree by lobbing a rock at the trunk. It stuck it's head out as if to say "what the...?" then quickly dashed back inside. The kids got a real kick out that! We were also entertained by about a million chipmunks (my gosh, they were EVERYWHERE!) and various squirrels and song birds.


The Map Man and the boys at our 3rd letterbox find of the day, stamping the note pads.



We love letterboxing!