2010-07-12 49 -122
We met an unexpected obstacle and then ran out of time.
| Mon 12 Jul 2010 in 49,-122: 49.1230667, -122.0967725 geohashing.info google osm bing/os kml crox |
Contents
Location
In the Vedder Canal, just north of the Trans-Canada Highway bridge over the canal.
Participants
Plans
Robyn and Wade were scheduled to drive over said bridge that afternoon, and so Robyn scouted out the ways to get under it. It looks as though North Parallel Road goes right to the bank of the canal and that there are routes down into it. On the other side, number two road goes right up to the bank of the river, meeting a canal-side route that also goes up to the bridge.
I've seen people fishing and boating in the canal. I brought a Wade, and if it's too deep to wade I also brought a boat.
Expedition
After the other expedition we stopped in at Robyn's brother's place to drop off a fancy gilt-edged edition of the complete works of Shakespeare and to drink juice and eat jelly beans. Delicious and sociable, but that took some time. Then we went to Point Roberts to pick up a package from our post box, but as Point Roberts is in another country we had to wait at the border in both directions, so that took some more time. We then took even more time to eat delicious Indian food in Langley, so we arrived at our highway exit to begin the expedition with less time that planned.
We started with the north route, but the road ended over five hundred metres from the canal. That was unexpected, but there was a track leading off through the grass, so we followed it, until it ended in long grass between a ditch and a barbed wire fence. Very strange, it seemed at the time. Closer study of the Google map later showed that we were on a spur of North Parallel road, labelled Trans-Canada Highway, and that the actual road we should have been on was slightly north. We never even saw the fork. It must have looked like a driveway. Not knowing that, we backtracked to the south route, where we were stopped at the canalside road by a gate. We would have continued on foot, because it was just a vehicle gate, but it was over two kilometres from the hash, we had to be at our real (non-geohashing) destination by seven p.m., and there was not enough buffer time in our schedule to jog the five kilometre round trip along the canal.
We found another route over the canal, to avoid having to backtrack west to our highway exit, and then realized as we re-entered the Trans-Canada to the east of the Vedder Canal, that had we made no attempt at all to reach the geohash, we would have passed within fifty metres of it, but by trying to reach the geohash, we only got within 300 metres.
A multi-foiled hash.
Maybe tomorrow we will reach our coordinates.
