How to have a gathering without planning it!

First you find a really great coffee shop. You visit it often and get to know the very nice owner. Then you offer to plant a letterbox in the shop. It will bring her business and give you just one more excuse to keep stopping by for coffee. If you are in the shop often enough, you might get to see a letterboxer scouting the area for a possible box. It also makes a great place to invite a local boxer to meet you for an exchange.
Today we had a planned meeting with resQLou and the three basseteers. I mentioned this to threespoiledboxers in case they wanted to drop in. I arrived at the coffee shop to see a table full of letterboxers exchanging stamps! It just so happened, Carolina Pines had stopped by to find our box before they headed out of town. It was so fun. Tons of kids and inky fingers and meeting lots of new letterboxers...That's my kind of day! Now we have faces to put with some really cool people.
ResQLou, smax and 7, and the fambly and I went on to some of the local bridges. We had a great time. '7' even chanced upon a geo-cache. That explained the blue paint chips in my letterbox. It was so funny because after we put in all of our junk so we could take out some of their junk, my kids seemed to like what resQlou put in the most!! We could've exchanged junk at her car: ) Fender bender did manage to get an emergency poncho, which is probably about the most useful junk I've ever seen in a geo-cache.
The upstate letterboxing community is growing. It is very fun to have some local boxing buddies. And to those not so local, stop by sometime for a cup of coffee at Leopard Forest. You never know who will be there.