2025-06-07 42 -88

Location

A strip mall parking lot in Algonquin.

Participants

Expedition

In the eyes of my mother, at least, this expedition was only partly about humoring me. Really, it was about spoiling my dog.

This expedition is definitely more of a schlep than the usual ones I can talk my parents into, and I made it clear when I first mentioned it that it was just a possibility that I was throwing out there for consideration. Almost an hour's drive, each way, to go check out a strip mall parking lot? I figured it'd be a tough sell.

But my dog Stoby hasn't been doing well lately. He's got kidney failure. He has... maybe a week or two left, maybe not even. So we're doing everything we can to spoil him while we still can. And my mother happened to have read an article recently about how mentally stimulating car rides were for dogs, and was therefore pretty much looking for an excuse to go on a long car ride with our two dogs, whatever the destination.

Add in a weekend where we had nothing in the way of other plans, and to Algonquin we went!

The ride there was interesting. We went from suburbia in my neck of the woods to the country, with more farmland... and then got in the vicinity of Elgin, and it started looking like suburbia again, albeit a stretch of suburbia that my family rarely has reason to visit. That made sense since I knew the hashpoint was in a strip mall parking lot, but it was still interesting to see.

Sure enough, the strip mall adjacent to the hashpoint could have been anywhere in my part of the suburbs and fit right in. This one just happened to be almost an hour's drive away.

We probably hit the hashpoint just pulling into the parking lot for the strip mall, but I didn't check at the time. Instead, I headed out on foot to the hashpoint with our other dog, Dixie, intending to return with Stoby after. The sidewalk that went from where we'd parked to the hashpoint was a bit dingy, with some litter scattered around, but Dixie had a good time sniffing out her surroundings, at any rate.

There was a bush right by the hashpoint, and Dixie stuck her nose in it, as she does. I didn't think anything of it... until a duck emerged and flew out of the bush, settling on the other side of the parking lot's entrance.

This was right about when my phone announced that I had reached the hashpoint.

I got a screenshot and took a few pictures--of my own Stupid Grin, of the hashduck, of Dixie on (or near) the hashpoint... I was still on the sidewalk, and I was pretty sure that the hashpoint proper was on the asphalt, so I waited until it was safe and walked onto the asphalt a bit, just to cover my bases.

A minute later, a woman drove by and said, "What happened?"

I realized, in hindsight, that geohashing must look a bit odd from the outside. Specifically, I realized that my picture taking of a random spot in a strip mall might seem like I was documenting... something. A car accident, perhaps, was the first possibility that came to my mind.

"Oh, nothing, everything's fine!" I smiled and tried to reassure the stranger in the car.

I wasn't expecting her next question.

"Where's the duck?"

I realized that her thoughts were less "car accident" and more "that dog just terrified/possibly attacked that poor duck".

(The duck, for its part, seemed unbothered after initially being startled by Dixie's intrusion by snozz.)

I laughed and pointed where the duck had settled into place, just a bit out of Dixie's reach. (Coincidence? I think not.) "It's over there. It's fine too."

That seemed to satisfy the stranger in the car, and she drove off.

I went back to the car and got Stoby, but he had no interest in checking out the hashpoint, quickly pulling the other way once we reached the sidewalk. And... I'm not going to argue with an ill senior dog about such matters. Plus, I did want to check things out elsewhere too.

Stoby and I walked by a fire station and a church before turning around.

I had spotted that the strip mall had an ice cream restaurant in it, and sure enough, my mother and I ended up grabbing some ice cream there. (I could have sworn that the online blurb for the website mentioned ice cream for dogs, too, but I never did find out anything about that, and I didn't think to ask.) I took a few more pictures of the hashpoint area and threw out some of that litter around the sidewalk before we left the strip mall behind.

The expedition to the hashpoint ended there, but the car ride to indulge our dogs kept going, meandering through Elgin and St. Charles, through newly-built subdivisions and forest preserves... Stoby certainly got plenty to mentally stimulate him on that day!