2012-07-17 31 34

Location

At Shevet Benyamin street, 12th quarter of the city Asdod.

Participants

Omri (aka LinaK, aka me)

Lilac

Tal

Plans

We've been keeping an eye on the Tel Aviv and Beersheba graticules for a while, waiting for a hash that would be in a place that is both reachable for three high school students with no drivers license and not at sea/middle of desert/disputed territories/Egypt/army base/Gaza strip (and we had all of these at our graticule). So when the opportunity appeared, we had to go for it

Expedition

We started our field trip from Lilac's house in Kiryat Ono (Tal's her neighbor, Omri arrived by bike from Monoson), where we took the bus to the Tel Aviv train station. On the bus we met two of Omri's classmates and had a bit of a problem explaining them why we are going to Asdod (by the way, we became really good at explaining this game through the day, doing it repeatedly along the way with different people). From there we took the train south to Asdod, and because the Israeli train system had to live up to the stereotype, had to unexpectedly switch a train at Rehovot. Luckily for us a very friendly lady who's probably used to going by train helped us find our way to the second train.

Anyway, after managing to arrive at Asdod we took another bus from the train station, but as none of us really knows the place we just went off at where seemed right ("I don't know, on the map at home it seemed like a ten minute drive to the hash, so we should stop about here..." "It was near a roundabout at the map,"- "but we've already passed three roundabouts on the way"), which resulted in walking more, and having a stop for pizza at a small park along the way (did you know that in Asdod you can get a thousand island dressing on your pizza? This place is nuts!).

The hash itself was at a building so we walked to the top of it to see if there was an exit to the roof where we could get more accurate GPS readings but it was locked (and also it being a pretty religious and conservative area, we didn't seem to fit in very well, creeping out one of the little kids who lived there and was a little surprised to find us at his staircase).

It was already getting pretty late and we didn't want to miss the last train home (spoiler: we did), so we walked our way to where we remembered there was supposed to be a bus back to the train station, losing some time in getting ice-cream (it's Israel in the middle of the summer and it was ridiculously hot as always) and searching for a toilet that actually had toilet paper (too much information?). We finally arrived at the bus stop and after half an hour of no bus appearing it was obvious we couldn't make it on time to the last train, making us move to plan B- calling Tal's brother to pick us up from a town that's more than half an hour drive from Kiryat Ono (Thank you very much, Tal's brother. You saved us from having to make a camping geohash in a public park in a neighborhood we don't know). From there it was just a small bike ride (for me), to end up a very fun first geohash.