2024-12-28 41 -88

Location

A strip mall parking lot in Woodridge.

Participants

Plans

Stop by while out running errands in the morning - Tarasaurus

Expedition

Tarasaurus

Working overnight shifts does strange things to people. For example, driving all the way out to Westmont to buy 3d printer filament the instant the store opens in the morning so that I can be home in time to get a little bit of sleep before work. Fortunately, I could pair such a shopping trip with a geohashing expedition since Woodridge is mostly on the way out to the store. I pulled up around 9:30 am in the morning to find myself in a Rosati's parking lot. Unfortunately they wouldn't open until 11, which was a shame because I suddenly had a craving for deep dish pizza.

I pulled up Geohash Droid on my phone and searched for the point. On the satellite images it appeared to be directly adjacent to the big sign for the strip mall, but the GPS led me closer and closer to the road, eventually deciding I had reached it while under a tree in the road verge strip. I grabbed the obligatory grin photo with Sylvie and retreated to the car since it was super uncomfortable standing that close to moving traffic. I announced my success on the Geohashing Discord server and then headed off to the store, eventually making it home before 11am.

Haberdasher

My parents were up for using the day's geohash as an excuse for an outing on a lazy Saturday afternoon. We even loaded up our two dogs and brought them with for the ride. We did have contractors coming by early in the afternoon, though, so we didn't actually head out until after 3 PM, several hours after Tarasaurus' morning expedition.

I remembered that the hashpoint was in a strip mall hosting a famous Chicago area pizzeria, and I dutifully plugged in "Lou Malnati's in Woodridge" to my GPS... only to check our location to the hashpoint on a whim partway through the drive to the hashpoint to find that while the GPS was taking us south still, the hashpoint was in fact due almost exactly west.

...turns out I had the wrong famous Chicago area pizzeria. It was by the Rosati's in Woodridge, not the Lou Malnati's! Luckily my fortuitous GPS checking meant we turned only an intersection or two late, and the drive wasn't difficult from that point on either, so all we burned was a minute or two of time when we had plenty of time to spare.

Rather than try to direct my parents to drive close to the hashpoint, I had them park in a random spot in the strip mall and got out to walk to the hashpoint. It was right off the sidewalk, and didn't even require much GPS dancing to get within range. This couldn't have been much more straightforward. And the Woodridge water tower in the background made for a nice touch in my shot of the hashpoint, if I do say so myself! I arrived just a few minutes shy of 4 PM and thought about dawdling there so that I'd be there at the "official" Saturday meet-up time, but decided not to bother.

I walked around part of the strip mall, and then we drove around it also after I returned to the car, to get a sense of what was in the strip mall besides Rosati's, but the answer was... not a ton. A couple other restaurants, a nail salon... nothing too exciting. Definitely the kind of strip mall I likely never would have stopped at if it weren't for geohashing leading me there. I didn't grab pizza from Rosati's, either; my parents had plans to eat Taco Bell that evening (family tradition, long story) and while I didn't want Taco Bell, I wasn't hungry enough to eat at Rosati's right that minute either.

This ended up just being the first stop on a family outing that also included a stop at Veteran's Park in Naperville to get the dogs some exercise and a place to relieve themselves, driving by a house with Christmas decorations dedicated to Taylor Swift, and grabbing some gas and some food on the way home. A very pleasant outing all in all, and I'm glad that geohashing got us out there in the first place.