2024-05-26 -40 145

Location

In a bovine paddock south of Forest.

Participants

Felix

Expedition

I've been travelling with my infant daughter Gretel and girlfriend Ruth (who is coincidentally also the mother of Gretel) along the north-west coast of Tasmania. Yesterday, we got off the ferry from Geelong at Davenport and drove to Stanley, a town on a peninsula off a peninsula, next to the imposing 'Nut' rocky plateau.

Anyway, there were no good geohashes on the way there (not without a bit more detouring than I was willing to suggest anyway). But today, the geohashing gods smiled upon me. There was a point only 24 minutes drive away, and then only 200m off the road inside a farm. It looked far away from any farmhouses and relatively easily accessible so it was on.

We climbed the Nut in the morning and then had lunch. And before Gretel's 2nd one hour nap I popped off in the car as the rain sheeted down and headed towards the hash.

The road was immediately very winding and rural, with not much traffic to contend with. In little time I was in the vicinity and pulled over. I went over to the farm gate and was immediately confronted with a small problem. Just beyond the fence was a chunky and menacing-looking bull. Maybe it was a just a large cow? No, there was a big, swinging dick dangling beneath it.

I was about to get back in Ruth's car and drive back to Stanley in defeat when I noticed that the bull was actually on the other side of an electric fence. No worries then! I opened the gate and closed it behind me, and walked down the track next to the fence and gully towards the hash.

Unfortunately, the hash was on the other side of a gate in the bull-enclosing electric fence further down, over a little causeway across the gully. I was about to turn around here too, since having her dad lethally run-through by a bull would no doubt inhibit some aspects of little Gretel's development (or maybe it would harden her into a fearsome warlord of the future Southern Federated Territories, who can say?).

There were several cows and actually a second bull in this paddock, it seemed. But as I approached this other gate, they all started trotting away from me, and looking back in curiosity/wariness. I thought, well, I'll go through and just clip the gate shut. If the bulls rush towards me I can always leg it back through the gate. I'll just test the waters and see what they do.

So I gingerly entered the bad paddock, slowly approaching the hash. I went from 46m at the gate down to 20m before I realised that, actually, I was in the wrong paddock. There was another barbed and electric fence separating the hash from mine and the bull's paddock. So I very quickly sneaked underneath this fence, walked right up to the hash and got it. I took some photos, flipped off the bulls and walked around to another gate, properly locked the gate I'd earlier gone through into the bull paddock, and then back up the track and into the car. I turned around and went home just as the rain set in again. I arrived well before Gretel awoke from her nap.

I also only realised that this had been an 'unlocked' graticule when John mentioned that he hadn't been here in the gchat group. Double win!