2010-03-19 41 -88

Location

Near some houses far from Aurora

Participants

Shandd
Cody

About

The snow has melted and the sun has returned. To mark this joyous occasion, I decided to go on my first expedition! It was in a housing development area and a muddy field.

Expedition

Shandd: I was sitting in my electricity class today and had a brief moment to check the geohash wiki. For the past 3 or 4 days I've been checking to see if there was point close enough to me that I could easily make the trip without wasting gas. Today was that day!

Right after school I took to the road with my phones gps, my marker, a road map, an Ariel picture of the hashpoint, and my buddy Cody. As was drove to our hashpoint we had high hopes of what was to come, neither of us really knowing what to expect. One thing I did expect was that, no matter how much I thought I planned it out, it would come apparent that I didn't plan it out well. And boy did that hit me in the face. One of our turns lacked a street sign and nearly caused us to miss our turn, then almost right after that we took a turn onto a road that was an exact copy of the one we were supposed to turn out, but not that road. Unknown to us we continued down that road and pulled onto a hill. I almost jumped out of my car to take off to the hashpoint until I realized something...There was a river in my way. This was the wrong road, I knew it, I never saw any river next to the hashpoint, so we wasted about 5 minutes sitting there trying to figure out where we went wrong. Apparently this was just recently built, and was made to look exactly like the other one (which wasn't finished either). Going back onto the path we were supposed to keep following we finally made the correct turn and pulled up to the spot to ditch the car. Taking all of our maps and the marker with us we learned that we were standing in a wind tunnel. The wind nearly ripped my marker apart right after I stepped foot onto the field.

When we stepped into the field we sunk into the ground. It was covered in mud and had puddles of water. Out in Aurora the grass is dry, we haven't had any rain for a while and the snow all melted like a week ago, but not here. We quickly tried to make it across the field, coating our shoes in mud and fighting the wind at the same time. Once we hit the general area of the hash I pulled out my phone to try and get the Latitude and Longitude correct, and that's where my biggest frustration came in. The thing barely works! The data would constantly change in almost unpredictable fashions and it was draining my battery. Trying to make sense of it we worked on finding the spot for nearly 20 minutes before giving up on the phone. I fell back onto the Ariel picture and used the landscape and buildings to find my way to the spot and check the GPS for it. I was nearly dead on by eye-balling it, only varying by the slightest mark. Quickly we planted the marker and took some pictures before attempting to take a picture of my phone with the date and Latitude and Longitude on it, and that's where the camera became difficult. It refused to take a clear picture of my phone before giving us the last punch in the gut via a low battery message. But none of that mattered anymore, we made it to our first hashpoint, and we were happy about it. Coming back the way we came we fought the wind and mud back to my car and returned home victorious.