2024-11-02 41 -89

Location

On a road in rural Compton, Illinois.

Participants

Haberdasher (talk)

Expedition

This one was just sort of meant to be, I think.

Being on the far east end of the Aurora graticule, I've never had much chance to go hashing one graticule west, in the graticule named for Sterling, Illinois. (One could argue that the graticule could be named for Dixon, Illinois, as both are towns with populations of ~15,000 people and hit-or-miss name recognition in the Chicagoland area. But I digress.) For one thing, it's a schlep. For another thing, the Sterling graticule is dominated by farmland, and I've never been especially keen on wading through cornfields to get to a hashpoint. Not because of the walking itself, but because of the distinct possibility that a farmer wouldn't be fond of a stranger wandering on their property for Internet bragging rights, and that such a farmer might be armed or otherwise willing to make things unpleasant for me over it.

But on this particular Saturday, I happened to be heading out to a family friend's house in northwest Illinois, in a town small enough that Dixon and its 15k residents look like "the big city" in comparison. And the hashpoint fell right on a road only a few minutes' drive away from said family friend's house, and in more or less the right direction to be a stopping point along the way. It'd make our drive a few minutes longer, if only because we had to go from the highway to smaller roads with lower speed limits, but not unreasonably long.

Still, I knew our original plans took precedence, and I was willing to wait and see if I could hit it on the way back home... but the other family friend who drove me was willing to check it out on the way there. I preferred that, honestly, so I didn't have to worry about it getting dark or us being too tired, but I wouldn't have pushed. Thankfully I didn't need to.

Side note: I had a mental block about where the hashpoint was located. I knew that the town name started with a C, but struggled to remember the full name. Was it Cortland? More than one I was half-convinced it was Cortland, rather than the actual town of Compton. Luckily I put the hashpoint's location directly into our navigation app rather than relying on addresses, so this didn't actually cause any navigational errors.

It all went pretty smoothly. We drove by the spot, and the first screenshot I got wasn't close enough only because the car was still moving fast enough that by the time I took the screenshot, we had moved out of range of the hashpoint. The driver stopped in the driveway of a house adjacent to the hashpoint, I got out and did the hash dance, and we headed on to our main destination, where we proceeded to have a nice lunch and some good conversation.

We did drive by the town of Compton along the way, but there's not much to it--a town hall and bar on the side we drove by, apparently a post office and church on the other side of town, but that's about it. And lots of farmland. And wind turbines dotting the land, which is always a fun addition to the scenery, particularly when the alternative is just flat, dead fields...