A hitchhiker (sometimes known as a “parasite”) is a letterbox with no permanent home. Instead, a hitchhiker travels from letterbox to letterbox, “hitching a ride” with whomever happens to find it.
A hitchhiker includes the same basic components as a letterbox: a rubber stamp (usually created just for that hitchhiker) and a journal in some kind of a container, either a small watertight plastic box with lid or a heavy duty ziplock bag. Hitchhikers in plastic bags are meant to be placed inside a host letterbox, so they’re usually very compact, without extra items like a stamp pad or pencil. Hitchhikers in plastic containers are meant to be hidden alongside a letterbox. Sometimes, there’s no room inside a letterbox or in a box’s hiding place for the hitchhiker, so you’ll have to carry the hitcher to your next destination instead.
Each portion of the journey is recorded. Stamp your personal stamp and the stamp of each host letterbox in the hitchhiker’s logbook. Stamp the hitcher in your own journal, counting it as a find in your PFX count. Finally, stamp the hitchhiker’s stamp into each letterbox where the hitcher makes a stop.
Most letterboxers who create hitchhikers like to live vicariously through reports of their hitchers’ progress through the country. If the creator requests updates from finders of the hitchhiker, please take a moment to send an email message when you get home. Some letterboxers track the progress of their hitchhikers on their Web sites You can report where you found the hitchhiker, but please don’t tell where you left it.
Finding a Hitchhiker
The whole point of hitchhikers is that they travel from box to box across the country. So what happens if you find a hitchhiker and you’re not planning to go letterboxing for several months? You might consider leaving the hitchhiker in the letterbox rather than letting it sit in your backpack or desk drawer for an extended period. Go ahead and stamp into the hitcher’s journal and record it in your own log, but let the next letterboxer carry the hitchhiker to its next home.
Logging a Hitchhiker
Whenever you find a hitchhiker, you need to make sure to log the find in several places.
- Record the hitchhiker’s stamp in your personal journal.
- Record your personal stamp in the hitchhiker’s journal.
- Record the hitcherhiker’s stamp in the host letterbox’s journal (the letterbox where you leave the hitcher).
- Record the stamp of each host letterbox in the hitchhiker’s journal.
This can be confusing when you’re out on the trail, especially when you’re with a group, so take your time and make sure that every journal is stamped accordingly.
Counting Hitchhikers That You Plant and Find
You should count each hitchhiker as a “find” in your PFX count. If you are the original creator of a hitchhiker, you can count it as one of your planted letterboxes. You should not count a hitchhiker as a plant when you leave it in a host letterbox.
There’s no agreement on how to record a hitchhiker that you find more than once. Some letterboxers will record it as a find, as long as it’s been carried by other letterboxers to at least one other letterbox in between finds. (In other words, you can’t leave a hitchhiker in a letterbox, and then come back a month later and “find” the hitchhiker in that same box.) But most letterboxers would move the hitchhiker to a new box, but not include any subsequent finds of that hitchhiker in their PFX count.
Providing Hitchhiker Status Reports
Most letterboxers enjoy hearing about the travels of their hitchhikers. If a hitchhiker includes the email address of its creator, please send a status report indicating where you found and where you left the hitchhiker. Some hitchhikers even have their own web pages where their travels are recorded.
Dropping Off a Hitchhiker
Hitchhikers and letterboxes come in all shapes and sizes, and sometimes the two are incompatible. If you carry a hichhiker to a new letterbox and find that it doesn’t fit inside or in the box’s hiding place, then don’t leave the hitcher behind or record it in the letterbox log. Instead, carry it with you to the next letterbox you find.
It’s fine to leave a hitchhiker in a letterbox it’s already visited, but remember that the whole point of a hitchhikers is to see how many different boxes it can visit. It might be more fun to drop off the hichhiker at your next letterbox find instead.
