2010-03-07 41 -72

Location

In the trees near a road in Lebanon, CT.

Participants

Sara and her son.

Plans

We would rather have been at the global hash in Baton Rouge, and I briefly considered the feasibility of buying one round-trip plane ticket and a car rental, but the kids would also have needed plane tickets, and that would have made it prohibitively expensive. I also considered driving, but the kids are too young to help drive, and therefore a 24-hour (each way) drive would have been problematic.

So we inaugurated our family's Spring 2010 geohashing season closer to home instead.

Expedition

The First 80 km

It was a glorious day, and we're glad to be back to geohashing! It also happens to be my birthday.

We started out by dropping of my daughter at her friend's house in Wilbraham, MA, and then headed for the hashpoint. Wilbraham is east of the Interstate and the hashpoint is east of the Interstate, so we went there on secondary roads, which was fun. We customarily visit the playground which is closest to the hashpoint, but today we visited a playground very close to daughter's friend's house, so son could play while I did my hair.

Then, soon after we started out again, we saw some llamas, so we stopped at a closed farm stand next to the llamas, and when we stopped we saw that there were rabbits at the farmstand, and the llamas were actually at the house next door. We looked at the rabbits up close and the llamas from a distance, and then went back to the car to get the camera, took pictures of the rabbits, started to go take pictures of the llamas, and were stopped by the very polite farmstand proprietor who came out of her house and said we weren't allowed to visit the llamas (which presumably belonged to her neighbor), although visiting her bunnies was ok. That's the first time I have seen someone to keep llamas around here and not let people visit them. I mean, llamas are probably very expensive to keep just as pets, and I don't think people usually make much money by selling the wool, so I always thought llama farmers usually let people visit and get interested in the llamas, so that the people would then buy a sweater or something. But what do I know. You'll have to take my word for it that the llamas looked very peaceful and watched my son and me closely.

Another interesting thing we saw on the way there was a drive-through liquor store. I hadn't seen one in New England before. (We didn't stop because they don't sell liquor in Connecticut on Sundays.)

We parked on the road near the hashpoint, and saw that it was on private property, and inside a fence. We went up to the house, rang the doorbell, and asked the homeowner if we could walk around in his trees a little. He said that was fine. I was prepared to give a further explanation of what we wanted, but he didn't seem to want one, just like the VT homeowner we met last summer.

The Last 80 meters

Having gotten permission, we walked into the new-growth woods, which had slightly prickly plants all over the place growing to about the level of my son's head. This part of the trip was slow. I held down branches for my son, and carried him a little, and he was a trooper. He enjoyed "leading the way" for part of the time, and we took pictures, including a picture of some droppings so we could identify them at home (deer, it turns out).

Eventually we reached a point within GPS accuracy range (we were about 3m from the actual hashpoint - good enough) and took some more pictures, at which point my son asked if we could continue further into the woods because he was "enjoying this", but we had to get home. My son took possession of the camera and led the way back to the car, and said we had a "good adventure." That's about the best birthday present I could have wished for.

We drove home on the Interstate.