2009-04-16 48 -122

Thu 16 Apr 2009 in Bellingham: 48.9657078, -122.8002113 geohashing.info google osm bing/os kml crox

Location

Today's Bellingham, Washington graticule geohash was on the Birch Point peninsula in Semiahmoo Bay, very close to the Canadian border. It appeared to be just off the end of a side road from Semiahmoo Drive, but trees in the satellite view blocked knowledge of exactly what was there.

Planning Spontaneity

Planning consisted of thepiguy telling Robyn she should come with him for the border hash, because he'd never done one before, Rhonda saying she'd come too, and everyone trying to explain where to meet in a riot of edit conflicts. See the talk page for more details. Everything else we made up on the fly.

Partcipants

In order of being recruited for the mission:

• thepiguy
• Robyn
• Rhonda
• Kristie (who wasn't really a geohasher, see below)

Expedition

Rhonda

I knew I had to catch the 10:30AM Seabus if I wanted to join the others at the Peace Arch at 1PM, so I scrambled to get my stuff together (chores? bah!), pumped up the tires on my bike since it hadn't been ridden for a few months, and ran out the door.

The fastest way to ride a bike from downtown Vancouver to the border.

A block from home, I found out that my bike's brakes desperately need to be replaced. As I careened toward 1st St., I gave thanks that I was on a quiet road and made a hard left so my brakes were only working against my forward momentum and not gravity as well. (For those who don't know, the altitude change from 1st St. to 2nd St. in North Vancouver is equivalent to two stories in a building.) With a mental note to replace the brakes tomorrow and also to start braking well in advance, I continued toward the Seabus.

Because busses can only carry two bikes, I opted to catch the 351 at its terminus station instead of the station closest to the seabus - only a couple of blocks farther.

My GPS, which had faithfully recorded my route from inside the Seabus, complained about a weak signal inside the bus, so I sat with my arm against the window. Also that way I could keep an eye on my bike, on its rack on the front of the bus.

The bus headed through downtown, keeping its schedule faithfully, as recorded by the Translink auditor sitting across from me with his clipboard, chatting with the driver about the absurd prices demanded by scalpers for hockey tickets.

At one of the stops, I recognized Robyn out front with her bike just as the bus opened its doors, and collected my stuff off the seat beside me so she and T-Rex could sit there.

thepiguy

thepiguy set out at 11:00 on the dot, and then again at 11:15 once he turned around went back to his house to pick up a few items he forgot.

thepiguy runs into some cycling difficulties

He took all his usual bike routes and uttered a small curse at translink for forcing him to take a bus through the tunnel. Once in Ladner he began following the cycling directions he had figured out in the morning. Being an extremely intelligent adventurer idiot he didn't actually bring them with him and had to figured out where to go by memory. He kept trying to take the most obvious and direct route to the border (i.e. the highway) but kept getting turned back by every cyclists favorite road sign.

By the time he was speeding down the gigantic hill on the highway, everything was going great, but by the time he was trundling up the giant hill in White Rock he was very behind schedule. He kept passing bus stops and thinking of Robyn and Rhonda hoping that since he had been nice and said he'd wait for them, they'd do the same and wouldn't leave without him.

Once he finally made it to the designated meeting spot he decided to promptly collapse.

Robyn

I put off packing for my mission that might start tomorrow, hastily cleaned my kitchen, grabbed my passport and headed for the border. Vancouver is bisected by the mighty Fraser River, which can be crossed by numerous bridges, a ferry or a tunnel, but the last, while the most convenient way across for my route, is off limits to bicycles. I didn't want to take the time to go around the long way, where I always get stuck in the mud on an unpaved bike route in Surrey, so I rode out to Granville Street to wait for the 351 bus, which would take me to within 30 blocks of the border.

It's always a little suspenseful waiting for a bus with a bicycle. The buses have bike racks, but each bus can take only two bikes, so if two other people have decided to take bikes on the bus that day, you're out of luck. The 601 came with an empty bike rack and I wondered if I should get on it instead, and go to the Ladner Exchange. Fortunately the 351 arrived with only one bike on it, so I didn't have to figure that out. And the one bike was Rhonda's, so all was well.

All

Border

After photographing the Peace Arch and wandering around and reading all the commemorative monuments (commemorating the border being unfortified, the surveyors doing a good job figuring out where the border was (although it wasn't quite at 49N by our GPSes), Canada and the US not having had a war since 1814, and more stuff like that) Rhonda and Robyn noticed another cyclist approaching. He rode down the southbound road, veered across the traffic lanes onto the grass of the park and then dropped the bike and collapsed supine in front of the Peace Arch, gasping, "White Rock ... is .. uphill."

This is the right way, right guys?

Robyn stood back to watch another line on the Meetup Graph form, waiting for one to ask the other if they were from the Internet, but Rhonda just watched to make sure thepiguy didn't need immediate medical attention and no one remembered to take a picture. Everyone got back on the bikes and followed Robyn past the lines of cars waiting to cross the border, between the spaces in a barricade marked Road Closed - No Entry, around the corner of a building through a collection of disused, rusting border gates and what may have been old Christmas decorations. Just when they were starting to believe that Robyn's 'experience' at crossing the the border was really experience at sneaking past the border without clearing customs, she stopped at a door labelled "Pedestrian Entrance."

Unfortunately the effect was kind of ruined by the fact that the door was locked. They'd changed the usable entrance door to another one, behind the building. Inside, there was a velvet roped area for queuing with a sign saying "enter here" but no one in the queue. Robyn entered where the sign said, but instead of going all the way through the velvet ropes and back, just went around the other side of the sign to the front of the line. The others were just starting to tell her that she was doing it wrong, when an agent at the other side of the room said we could come to her. This necessitated everyone climbing over, under or around the velvet ropes, so no one knew who was doing it wrong any more, and we just handed over our passports.

Robyn was still playing the role of "person in this expedition who knows what is going on" so she answered the questions.

"Where are you going?"

"Semiahmoo Bay."

"Just out for a bike ride?"

"We're members of an adventure club, and today our meeting location is out there."

"Adventure Club, hmm, what are you going to do?"

"Play games, meet whoever else is there ... last week we went kayaking."

The trick is, you don't have to persuade the people at the border that you are sane, just that you aren't going to try and blow anything up. She gave us our passports back and we looked at the pictures to figure out who was who. She also gave us an orange post-it with the letter A written on the back. Robyn knew what this was for, so took it and all went back out to the bikes.

Behind the building, on the south, i.e. American, side, there are a number of parking spots where the people who are 'randomly' selected for car searches park. And there are officers out there. Robyn gave one of the officers the orange post-it, saying, "Presumably "A" means, 'Please let these three people pass'." The officer didn't let on that Robyn had cracked the secret code, merely took the post-it and allowed the trio to pass.

I wonder what letter we'd have got if there were four of us.

Riding to the hash point

Okay, I'll take this one.

Heading home

• road circling back to the geohash after appearing to pass it
• pinecones
• meople
• Kristie
• hashcard
• Mexican food
• the guy five hundred metres from the border who thought Vancouver was too far to ride
• Detour to Canada
• clearing at the car lane

Photos

• 

  The obligatory GPS shot.

• 

  The money shot.

• 

  Bikes on buses made this hash a lot easier (for 2/3 of the expedition)

• 

  Welcome sign!

• 

  Not following the sign. Not.

• 

  Our bikes waited for us outside while we went in to eat.\

• 

  Possible the greatest sign I have ever seen!

• 

  Everyone at the border on the way back.

• 

  The gang cycling back through White Rock.