2009-03-18 35 140
| Wed 18 Mar 2009 in Chiba: 35.8034528, 140.1320614 geohashing.info google osm bing/os kml crox |
Participants
Expedition
Part three of a consecutive hash. Part four can be found here.
I was starting to get on a roll. The Tokyo hash for this day was up a mountain, well to the west of the city. But the Chiba hashpoint was in a parking lot at the intersection of highways 4 and 464. The Google satellite photo was good enough that I could pick out exactly which parking space to visit. Or so I thought.
My plan for getting there involved two subways and three trains over the course of an hour or so, to reach the somewhat oddly named Chiba Newtown Chuo station. The train line runs in the median of Route 464, which is a divided limited-access highway. Brilliantly, there is a pedestrian/bike path along the side of the highway. Where there's an exit ramp, the bike path has its own little bridge over it. This gave me a very straightforward walk of about a mile to the hashpoint.
It turns out that sometimes the satellite photo is out of date. My parking lot had a brand new convenience store squatting in the middle of it. There were still parking spaces, of course, but the lines had all been repainted. I was no longer certain of the exact location of the hashpoint.
I walked around the site enough that I was confident that I had passed within 10' of the hash, and wandered around inside the store for good measure. In retrospect, the point appears to be close to the SW corner of the building, a location I took a photo from.
The parking lot seems to have been overflow parking for a pachinko parlor across the road to the east. There's still a giant sign for the place on the site. (You can see the shadow it casts in the Google photo.)
I was really hoping to find some sort of squishy product available for sale at the Family Mart. I figured it should be worth about a bazillion GeoSquishy points to buy a squishy in the same building as the hash point. Alas, no squishies were to be had. I consoled myself with an ice cream instead.
Photos
Businesses in Japan have funny names. Wait, what?
Not just a parking lot anymore
I'm in the right place...
The pachinko sign
N from the hashpoint. That's the bottom of the pachinko sign.
The king of Family Mart
W from near the hash, toward neighboring cemetery
Closer view of cemetery
One of at least two huge bike lockups at the train station
