2023-11-03 -38 145

Fri 3 Nov 2023 in -38,145: -38.1895487, 145.1291359 geohashing.info google osm bing/os kml crox

Location

The zero per cent threatening Paratea Flora & Fauna Reserve

Participants

• Lachie
• Cam
• Patrick

Plans

All three of had to “work” during the day, which meant that we had eight hours between 9am and 5pm to undertake planning activities. In view of this circumstance, the only acceptable outcome was for Lachie to do all the planning and for Cam and Patrick to do none of the planning. In particular, Patrick came up (“cam up”) with a number of inventive reasons why the geohash was impossible, unrealistic and #safety3rd.

Planning went great, with Lachie saying words like “as we ride along, the Frankston line is right next to us, meaning we can head back at any time”. However, Lachie soon started to use inappropriate and aggressive language like “No trains are running along the Frankston line tonight and we are therefore committed to riding”.

Expedition

We all met at Flemington Bridge Station, Melbourne at 5pm. This was despite the fact that all three of us are legally obliged to continue working until 5pm and are famously unable to teleport from our work locations to the meeting site.

Cam had a banana, or as Skippy would say, an “bah-nah-nah-nah,-nah-nah”. The banana refused to be secured to the front of Cam’s bike, so Cam resolved the banana situation conclusively.

Cam had a banana. It refused to remain in position. Cam undertook aggressive manœuvers to ensure the banana ceased to cause addition concerns.

We then began our ride along Beach Rd. There was some wind. Unfortunately, this wind poured in the opposite direction from the direction we were riding. Lessons learnt: in future, we should arrange for the wind to go the other way.

We continued to Kananook Station. Patrick sent a message to his sister in relation to this who replied, “[m]ost dangerous station in Melbourne some say....”. We resolved that in view of the significant alleged risks, the only appropriate plan was to head to the local brewery for delicious brews and pizzas.

With pizza and beer consumption successfully completed, we resumed our journey to the geohash. After crossing a road, Lachie had a handlebar bag incident, which Patrick celebrated by aggressively riding into Lachie’s rear disc brake rotor. This caused extreme effectiveness: the brake now braked even without needing the brake handle to be activated. Unfortunately this outcome was inconsistent with actually moving to places. We had a geohash to find. Therefore the brake rotor was removed. Brakes are for the weak.

The rotor. It may look OK, but forward progress was impossible. (Removing the rotor solved this problem.)

We continued our journey in a hashward direction. Lachie continued routefinding us through a park with significant inclines and insignificant wheel–ground friction, or “loose gravel” as I like to call it. This caused Patrick to not know what was going on other than difficult riding, but soon he heard words like “we need to come back this way but we definitely will be taking another route” and “I have lost my Limited Edition Melburn Roobaix water bottle” from Lachie.

Indeed, this brought us to the hash location. Patrick’s phone oscillated between saying he was 511 metres and 1.118 km away from target zone, so he took the view that Lachie and Cam’s “you are at the hashpoint” was sufficient to constitute proof. It was now dark, but not just the regular kind of dark where there is no light in the visible spectrum, but the kind of dark where the Navstar GPS signals also disappear.

There was now significant concern over Lachie’s missing water bottle. The working theory was that the bottle had disappeared at site of the the Handlebar-bag-front-wheel-rotor-distension incident. Therefore we headed back there, however, bottle recovery operations were unsuccessful. The second-most popular view was that the bottle may have been left at the brewery. However, once more, bottle survey and recovery operations did not achieve success.

Darkness having fallen, we now needed to return to our places of abode, which were back in the city whence we came. Rather than boringly returning along the route we’d taken with its trains of not-running, we followed Lachie along the Dandenong Creek Trail to Yarraman station. This was a mistake because trains were still running along the line, causing Cam to contemplate “catching the train back to the city”. However the train was 34 minutes away, meaning that Cam was an easy target for liestruthful claims like “the train station is closed for the evening” and “you can definitely make it a dozen stations before the train arrives”.

However Cam was wily to our charms and decided to catch a train from Sandown Park. Lachie and Patrick were completely mature about this and definitely didn’t drop the hammer to unleash indiscriminate justice/see how many stations they could make before Cam’s train caught up. Unfortunately, despite Cam’s train was so slow it did not catch up to them before they had to leave the track and revert to an alternate rail trail.

Train arrival time at the trail junction point. Cam’s train is seven minutes away. Motion blur courtesy Metro Trains Melbourne JV and definitely not the photographer.

We diverted towards a city return. However, a critical event intervened: the release of tomorrow’s geohashing point(s).

Tomorrow’s geohash is not always in your favour and often very far away.

Patrick had previously made statements like “We have to be 100 per cent on tomorrow’s geohash and look it up as soon as possible, because I will not be heading backwards for a double geohash. Like, even if it’s twenty metres behind us, I will just say [unrepeatable Australian word] this [Australian] [Australian] dog[Australian] I’m not heading back even if [unrepeatable Australian] your parent’s [unrepeatable]”. Thankfully tomorrow’s hashpoint was 58 km away so it could disregarded with only level 4 geohashing embarrassment.

The remaining return to the city was uneventful, except that we are concerned Cam may still be at Sandown Park station.

Lachlan's Addendum

1. I finish work at 4:36 and did not leave work until 4:55.

Photos

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  Success

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  Proof

Achievements

Lachie, Patrick earned the Bicycle geohash achievement by cycling 131km to and from the (-38, 145) geohash on 2023-11-03.

Cam earned the Bicycle geohash achievement by cycling 100km to the (-38, 145) geohash on 2023-11-03.