2018-02-18 35 -81

Location

Beside a house in Stanley.

Participants

Plans

About to leave Charlotte by bike - so arrive around 1pm!

Expedition

Indeed I pulled up across the street from the hash house at precisely 1:00pm, perhaps the most punctual I've ever been at a geohash.

It had been a beautiful ride on a beautiful day (about 64F/18C and sunny), in fact my first ever long bike ride in my newly adopted state of North Carolina and my first ever Geohash attempt in North Carolina. Leaving a bit after 11am, the route took me first through an elegant older urban section of Charlotte along west Tuckaseegee Road that unfortunately was rising in price very quickly and being flipped, and there were a lot of protest signs up from the locals. Then over I-85 and through sort of cheaper suburban areas along Freedom Drive, still very nice.

A couple more turns took me past the entrance to the U.S. National Whitewater Center where the Olympic team practices (getting a lot more rural at this point) and then over the Catawba River and Mecklenburg-Gaston county line into the small town / bedroom community of Mt. Holly. A few more rural miles on busy two-lane route 27 and I arrived in Stanley, which seemed a pleasant small town and not doing too badly. A lot of the industry along 27 was still open, though I knew this area had seen better days before the loss of a lot of textile jobs.

The hash neighborhood turned out to be much more suburban and expansive than I'd pictured from the map, with lots of trees and hills and the homes on good-sized though not huge lots. The hash house looked friendly and well-kept. It was small enough that I suspected the point could be reached within error along an outside wall, but I wanted to get permission from the inhabitants first.

However, the doorbell didn't seem to work and they had the plastic outer door latched, making a knock impossible. Clearly someone was home (I heard a man listening to good blues music and talking to a buddy on the phone) but he wasn't going to be bothered. So after a couple minutes I figured I might as well just go for the point. It turned out to be closest reached at the back left corner of the house, by a high opaque fence that enclosed the yard. Yellow GPS was within 13 feet so I'll call it good enough - this is the approximate error radius of these devices. Fairly easy hash all told.

The ride back was more tiring since it had been so long since I'd done this kind of distance, but I made it back home a bit after 4pm (including an hour stop for BBQ, slaw, baked beans, hushpuppies, and fries in Mt. Holly.) I'm really glad to be back hashing!