2024-04-01 -37 144
| Mon 1 Apr 2024 in -37,144: -37.5793903, 144.3586298 geohashing.info google osm bing/os kml crox |
Location
On the roadside of Mt Blackwood road.
Participants
Expedition
Bridget and I were on holidays over Easter out in western Victoria, staying with large flock of corellas by the Wimmera River in Dimboola. We even ventured out into the still locked Nhill graticule on one day but there were no hashes anywhere at all convenient while we were there. However, on the day of our drive home we were able to pick up another Melbourne West hash. As unexciting as a car hash in my home graticule is, it was still impossible to turn down, being only about a 5 minute trip each way off the Western Freeway that we were travelling along.
After stopping for a morning tea of hot chips and a lemon slice at the bakery in Beaufort, I took over the driving to lead us hashwards. Bridget doesn't quite see the point of car hashes without much sense of adventure or the benefit of exercise for that matter. I tried to explain that there's the competition aspect to consider too. A boring car hash is still better than no hash, as we want to reach more hashes than other people/parts of the world. It may not be worth a dedicated driving trip, but when it's no more than a 15 minute detour in total...
But, Bridget countered, is it worth looking like weirdos parking on the road outside someone's rural property to loiter about staring at your phone and taking photos for a minute or two? And what if the roads are in too poor a shape for a little city car? I reassured her that I had checked the roads on streetview and they were paved the whole way, so her car would be fine, but this promise would come back to bite me.
After passing Ballan, we left the freeway, and while the road was mostly fine, there was one patch where some serious divots in the road leapt out at us, I swerved slightly for my tyres to avoid the worst of it, but I had failed to account for the ridgeline between the valleys in the bitumen, this slightly scraped the bottom of the car. Not good, but we continued on our way.
We got to the hash, Bridget stayed in the car, while I, less averse to looking like a weirdo, and more hash-motivated, leapt out and found the point without difficulty. Although, we had overshot slightly where we parked, I did have to walk back 60m or so, as you can see by the distance of the car in the hash-pic. I jogged back to the car, and we set off again.
On the road back to the freeway (a different road to the one we'd taken), bad road conditions struck again. Again, the road had been pretty fine for a while, the speed limit was nominally 100kph, lulling me into a false sense of security. I wasn't doing 100, but I was going too fast for the potholey mess that presented itself without warning. Before I knew it, a much worse scraping sound screamed out from beneath us. Oh dear. I pulled over and we took a few minutes to regather ourselves. Thankfully nothing seemed wrong with the car on first inspection. No warning lights sprung up, and as we cautiously got moving again, the car seemed to be behaving normally. We got back to the freeway, and the rest of the trip home was uneventful. Fingers crossed no problems emerge with the car over the next little while, and, when it has its scheduled service in a couple of months, hopefully it emerges with a clean bill of health.
Photos
Gps
Success
