SURPRISE CITY sounds intriguing. Could you explain the game a little more?

PDX Wolfpack, I would LOVE to explain. Surprise City is one of my fondest childhood memories.
My Mother made a long roll out sidewalk out of old bluejean legs all sewn together. She used a black magic marker and made sidewalk squares and numbered them 1 through I think 25. The squares were something different every time, so no matter how many times you played the game, it was "new". She had numbers 1,2, and 3 on pieces of paper and we drew them out of a bowl.That's how many spaces we would move. The first person to get through the city won.
The spaces were each something different in the city, this would depend on what Mama had on hand on that particular day. They also changed.... so you didn't know which block was a certain thing. Some of the spaces were:
Post Office.... if you landed on this space, you'd get a letter.... sometimes it was a real letter saying HELLO HOW ARE YOU?.... Sometimes it was a BILL...... all things my Mother had made up ahead of time.
BAKERY.... We'd get one of Mama's homemade doughnuts.
NEWS STAND....We'd get the newspaper and have to read the funnies.
ICE CREAM SHOP.... OUR FAVORITE.... we'd get to have an ice cream cone.
JAIL..... if we landed on this, it meant we'd been in trouble and had to go to Jail. We always had to sit in the corner and lose one of our turns. We HATED this space.
SANDWICH SHOP.... we would have a sandwich
SCHOOL.... we didn't like this one either........ we'd have to do a worksheet, again... something Mama had made up ahead of time.
BANK.... We would receive MONEY....back then it was a quarter... now it would probably be a dollar... inflation you know. haha
LIBRARY....Where we would have to sit quiet and read a book until our next turn.
ARTISTS STUDIO.... We'd have to draw a picture and at least one of the other players would have to guess what it was.
FRIENDS HOUSE.... where we'd have to shake hands with another player and ask how they'd been doing.

Sometimes spaces were duplicated, but thankfully there was always only ONE jail and only ONE school !!!

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The game was ALWAYS fun ..... and friends were asking to play it for years. My Mama would say "You are too big for Surprise City".... and we'd say NO WE'RE NOTTTTTTTTTTT! So she'd set it up.

Let me know if you decide to give that a try !!!

I am sooo going to try Surprise City! What a great game for a rainy day. (I think I might try putting numbers on something other than jeans. I'm not quite that resourceful:)) I'm already thinking of other spaces:
Dentist: Go brush your teeth
Zoo: Find the cat and feed it a treat

Your mama sounds totally cool. I hope my kids remember me as fondly.

PDX Wolf Pack

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Anybody else have childhood memories that could have led them down the path of letterboxing?

Well, a little less directly connected, but I used to always ask my grandmother to take me to historical sites and parks, especially cemeteries! I loved find stuff there and keeping it. I also seem to remember stuffing something into the wall of our house as a time capsule of sorts...it was a little note or something, but it marked the place as mine forever, as far as I was concerned.