2009-06-26 40 -74

Location

The NJ Foundation for the Blind in Denville, NJ, somewhere in the middle of their building.

Participants

Knitting Duck
Knitting Duck's navigator and would-be drag-along geohasher.

Plans

Er... we were supposed to plan?

Knitting Duck became manically obsessed with the idea the previous night and was delighted to find the next day's hash to be less than twenty minutes by car from her home base. About an hour was spent perusing this wiki, googling for maps, and convincing the navigator to go along. (That last part actually only took about thirty seconds. He knows the comic.)

We did have half-baked plans to estimate the exact location of the hash by pacing off the length of the building and calculating the proportions from the google image. We never got the chance to try it, though.

Expedition

The drive along 46W was pleasant despite the mild afternoon traffic. We didn't even miss our exit, nor did we get lost on side streets in the remaining mile or so of our pilgrimage. It only took us one drive-by to notice the lake and locate the address containing our first attempted hash.

The first sign we saw told us that we had found the NJ Foundation for the Blind. About three car lengths up the driveway after that, we saw the first No Trespassing sign. We parked beside it and proceeded to take pictures of the signs, the lovely water, the car, and each other.

We saw a truck and an SUV pass us on the driveway and leave the area, and there was someone up near the building working on maintenance or landscaping. We contemplated walking and/or driving slowly up the path to chat with the person working there, but quickly chickened out. (Our excuse is that it's a school for the blind and if they don't want us to trespass, that's cool with us.)

Being novice geohashers a bit giddy with the delightful randomness of the experience, we totally forgot to leave our mark. We had sidewalk chalk and a paper "THE INTERNET WAS HERE" sign all ready to go, and still completely forgot!

We then packed up our cameras and headed home as satisfied failures.

Coordinates not reached. :-(

Hopefully not terrible for a first attempt, nonetheless! :-)

Lessons (Theoretically) Learned

Invest in a handheld GPS unit. (They look like a lot of fun and a lot easier than pacing off distances and calculating ratios.)
Don't forget to photograph proof of date/time. (Even if you failed. You know, for posterity.)
Don't forget to leave the sign/chalk drawing. (Even if you're giddy because you're a novice.)
Don't panic! (It's just good advice all around.)

Photos

Our first clue that we would not reach the coordinates today.
Our second clue.
Three clues make a sure thing, right? Yeah, that's what we thought.
We proceeded to take photographic evidence of our failure.
The lake was pretty...
... so we took pictures of it, too.
Wildlife Encounter! Geese doing goose-things in the lake.
The building we didn't have the guts to approach. The coordinates ought to be somewhere in the building directly behind those bushes. So close... yet so far.
A picture Knitting Duck took of her navigator taking a picture of Knitting Duck sitting atop Jeffy the Geo.


Fri 26 Jun 2009 in 40,-74: 40.8998493, -74.4662477 geohashing.info google osm bing/os kml crox