2009-01-08 41 -83

About

This day's coordinates were in the northbound lane of a small road in the outskirts of the Michigan suburbs of Toledo.

Expedition

excellentdude: ...and now the conclusion. I returned home from my Lansing geohash and turned on the evening news. I was so excited to find that the local hash was so close earlier in the day, that I hadn't checked on what any of the neighboring graticules looked like for the day. In the graticule to the southeast, the hash appeared to be either right in the road or between a sidewalk and a road. I thought, "Great! A public place where I don't have to worry about anybody's permission!" The snow had subsided, and according to the weather report, the next wave wasn't due into the area until after 1am. It wouldn't take me nearly that long to get there and back, so I decided to give it a shot.

Despite the roads being freeways most of the way there, they were only mostly cleaned off. This was especially true the first half of the trip. The driving conditions weren't awful, but they weren't ideal either. I made it to the neighborhood, parked my car, and decided to take what turned out to be a 20-minute walk around the circumference of the neighborhood. I needed the exercise and didn't want to just pop out of my car and start taking pictures at 9pm. During the walk, I passed through the intersection of Sanibel and Captiva. I had to laugh. These streets are named after two islands in Florida I had visited with a good friend of mine almost exactly a year ago. The setting I was in could not have been less Sanibel and Captiva-like. At the end of the walk, I found the coordinates were indeed in the road. I got a quick GPS reading and a picture. There were more pictures than I have uploaded, but the iPhone camera doesn't have a flash so most did not turn out well. I'll keep that in mind for future expeditions. ;-) I couldn't even line up my goofy smile pic well with any lighting, so it ended up being a dark shot of some of my hair. :-p I got back in my car, then went for the speed racer geohash. I didn't see a posted limit, but given the neighborhood, I figured the speed limit was around 20 or 25 mph.

As I headed back home, the snow storm that wasn't supposed to hit until 1am started at about 10:30pm. The last half of the roads were pretty bad. I even called in a fresh wreck I saw to the local sheriff. Traffic was going 10 - 15 mph under the speed limit. Just like earlier in the day, it took awhile, but I finally made it home.