2018-04-16 34 -77

Location

In the woods off Great Lake Rd in the Croatan National Forest

Participants

Pedalpusher

Expedition

I was visiting my brother and his family over a long weekend in New Bern, NC. He finished up with his training in Texas and moved to NC so it's a lot closer to visit now from NY. It was great to see the two little nieces and they also picked up two puppies while I was there. It was a very adorable weekend.

Today was the day I was going to start driving home. My brother had to go to work in the morning, but I hung out with the family until about noon. With the car packed up, I said my good-byes and fired up the GPS on my phone. I saw this Hash was in the Croatan Nat'l Forest, just off a road, but I wasn't sure if I would be able to get there. My brother bought a Mountain Bike the previous week and I brought mine so we could go for a ride. We went to the Nat'l Forest to ride on Saturday and while the main road was dirt, it was decently maintained with pot-holes here and there. However, the smaller roads were less maintained and some were very swampy.

Finding the first turn off the main road, it looked a lot narrower but looked maintained so things were still promising. Halfway down, there was another turnoff I could have taken, but it was clearly a very muddy and swampy road so I stayed on my current track going a little further, but probably safer way. It turned out all the roads the GPS took me down were passable and I found a good place to pull over and park.

Switching over to the hand-held GPS, I started into the forest and was very happy to see this section had no standing water anywhere with firm ground to cross. Making my way through the underbrush without too much trouble, I periodically checked my legs for ticks and I found three before getting to the hash. I tried crushing them, but I'm not sure if I killed them or not. Closing in on the hash, I circled around in the expected GPS dance before finding success and adding a new Graticule to my list. I headed back to the road and found my way out of the forest and made my way to my friends house in Maryland (fortunately, no further ticks were found). There was another hash that was possible to get on my drive up in Virginia Beach, Virginia; it looks like it's in a commercial area on the edge of a parking lot. However, this would have added an additional 2 hours+ to my drive and I didn't want to get to my friend's place too late.

Spending the night there, I was able to check the hash-points the next morning when I stopped for breakfast and found I could make a few detours on my way back to Buffalo. This was going to be the start of a Consecutive Hash! Part 1 of the next day's adventure can be found here.

As an additional bonus, this looks like it will also be a Last Man Standing expedition. Correction: in April 2021, another expedition was posted for this day nullifying the Last Man Standing ribbon.