2009-04-18 41 -87

Sat 18 Apr 2009 in Chicago: 41.0845888, -87.8377370 geohashing.info google osm bing/os kml crox

Location

On I-57 in Kankakee, Ill.

Making a decision to make it there

It was a longer process than usual for me to decide to go, since Kankakee is so far away from Chicago, it was the warmest day since--hey! maybe since Election Day! That was a good day for Chicago--and also Joshua! and I had originally planned to go to the Indiana Dunes but were derailed on account of my laziness. Really it is so great that these meetups are scheduled to be at 4pm, so, so great.

The deciding factor was that we might be able to avoid the clouds if we escape the lake area. Also, (well, maybe this was actually the deciding factor) the hashpoint fell right on a highway extremely accesible from Chicago, so that I could get my first speed racer award! yay! This is what I did.

Making it there

As you can see the point is extremely easy to get to by car, which is good because it fell on the rightmost lane of Highway 57. We finally decided (after some quibbling) to set off for there at 2:45, which worked out almost perfectly because we drove through the hash at 3:56. It would have worked out perfectly if I had actually driven the speed limit like Google assumes, and not frantically slowed down for the last few miles when it became obvious I would drive through the spot a little too early.

Due to the earlier quibbling I let Joshua! pick the music. He settled on the Cubs v. Cardinals broadcast on AM radio, which I have never listened to before. Many questions were asked about bases and runs, and in return for those answers many answers were given, unsolicited, to questions about scalars and vectors and positive-definite non-degenerate symmetric bilinear forms.

Making away from there

Here are pictures of the road. (pictures of road) I am really sorry I essentially didn't get any proof at all. My flash-reflecting phone had the GPS, and in the excitement of picture-taking while wheel-steering I forgot to set the camera's aspect ratio to 4:3 instead of a car-clock-cropping 16:9. I will just ask you to trust that the point was passed through, at very close to 4pm CST. At the very least I stayed in the right-most lane for a large swath of road buffering the hashpoint.

Afterwards we ate a small dinner at a Taco Bell/KFC, where the new grilled chicken pieces were discovered to be delicious AND good for you! relatively! and then set about to explore the town of Kankakee. Joshua! and I got into an argument about the quality of life in small towns, where he was pro and I con. Kankakee is a fun name to say but it was really depressing (for me) to walk through. Totally dead downtown, run-down shops and houses, nobody walking anywhere, no parks, no life. Quaint railway station, though.

Getting back in the car we had a minor one-way street confusion, but shortly righted it. The announcer told us that the game was tied at 5 runs each at the end of the 9th inning, so it would go on for two more before the Cubs finally won! Hurrah, why not! But traffic was pretty bad coming back.

All in all we spent 4 hours in the car. Exhausting.

Making out like a bandit

virgletati earned the Speed racer achievement by passing through the (41, -87) geohash on 2009-04-18 at 65 mph.

virgletati earned the Drag-along achievement by dragging Joshua! to the (41, -87) geohash on 2009-04-18.