2013-03-10 49 -122

Location

A wooded corner of a public park in White Rock.

Participants

Plans

We will head out here in the afternoon, leaving downtown Vancouver around one p.m. on a motorcycle, putting us at the geohash around two p.m.

Expedition

Wade and Robyn

It started at 2:00 am, when Wade failed to set the clocks back an hour. At 8:00 PST, Wade woke up realized that he had about 50 minutes before he needed to leave for church, and started to read his email. At 8:10 PST, Wade realized that it was actually 9:10 PDT, and he was supposed to have left 20 minutes ago. At 9:15 PDT, Wade rushed out of the house with no geohashing equipment. Speed limits were broken in the attempt to get to church no later than he already was, but since he would get divine forgiveness at the end of the trip, Wade figured it's all OK.

After church, Robyn met Wade and his friends for brunch. The original plan was to go straight from brunch to the hash-point, but since Wade had rushed out without a GPS or clothing appropiate for possibe bush-whacking, they returned home to properly equip themselves for the journey.

After acquiring a full tank of gas, a GPS with the coordinates, and jeans, Wade, Robyn and T-Rex got on the road and started navigating to White Rock.

People aren't used to seeing a dinosaur on the back of a motorcycle, so T-Rex got a lot of attention from children (and some adults) in nearby cars. T-Rex considers it his mission to cheer up bored children in the back of cars.

They arrived at the hash point and Wade parked at the side of the street near the point. Wade didn't like that spot, so he started the bike up and moved to park on the street in a nearby cul-de-sack. Wade didn't want to park on the street, and thought maybe the parking lot for the nearby sports field would be better, so he started the bike up again and began driving there. On the way, they went within 2m of the hashpoint. Wade thought it was stupid to park in a lot so far away from the hashpoint when there was perfectly good on-street parking nearby, so he did a U-turn, and went back to the original place where they had stopped. This time he declared this was where they were parking, and the bike would stay there. Robyn appreciated that her guy liked to go parking with her, but though he might have the wrong idea about what the popular activity of "parking" entailed.

Robyn spent longer entering the coordinates into her GPS than she did walking the forty metres or so from the bike to the zero point. Initially the unit zeroed on the sidewalk, but after a bit of fine tuning with a compass, and moving the GPS to and fro, it seemed to stay closest to zero for the longest just off the sidewalk into the bush.

90s Trivia

Robyn had intended to bring a game, well half of a game anyway, the question cards from a "90s Edition" of Trivial Pursuit, from T-Rex' homeland (i.e. a thrift store). Having forgotten the game, we were forced to make up our own trivia from the 1990s. Quick now, what happened in the '90s? Do you remember? You get a pass if you weren't there. We remembered (although not necessarily accurately):

Bill Clinton (we would have remembered Mulroney and Chretien had we gone that way, but Bill made us think of ...)
Monica Lewinski
Donna Rice (although I just checked and she was 1988)
Fawn Hall (story started in 1989)
Princess Di
You could bring a 2L bottle of pop and a radio controlled robot onto a commercial passenger flight
Arthur cartoons
the O.J. Simpson trial
the rise of the first person shooter: from Castle Wolfenstein to Half Life
Ultima Online
Myst
Toronto Blue Jays Threepeat winning "the Grey Cup, no whatever the Stanley Cup of baseball is, World Series"
the return of Star Wars, with the first movie of the prequel trilogy
the previous Gulf War, the one that kicked Iraq out of Kuwait
Milli Vanilli
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Voyager

Corrections and additions in the comments, please.

The End

It was pretty cold, so once we had exhausted our knowledge of the 1990s we marked the hash for future visitors. A quick segue from Star Trek to DVDs to Big Bang Theory left Robyn in a Klingon mood, so the markings are in Klingon, but geohashers will understand. Brush up on your nineties trivia Vancouver area hashers. Robyn might remember the game next time.