2012-02-29 42 -71

Location

Probably on someone's driveway
Near Lost Pond Reservation
Border of Newton, MA and Brookline, MA

Participants

Phyzome plans to attend -- poke on IRC or userpage to coordinate!

Plans

Phyzome: I plan on taking the Green Line out after work, maybe starting around 4:30. I'll either walk from there or take bus 60 to get closer. If I walk through the woods, I can shave 0.7 miles off the walk from the Green Line. Will bring chocolate.

Expedition

Phyzome:

I left work at around 4:45 PM EST (dusk), taking the Red Line to Park Street, then the Green Line (D/Riverside) out to Brookline Hills. My planning was kind of terrible, so my photos of Google Maps (which I use in lieu of a proper streetmap-integrated GPS) did not include how to get from the T station to bus 60. By the time I figured it out (using a map I still had loaded in my browser on my laptop) I had just missed the bus, and had to wait for about 20 minutes. The bus dropped me off in some commercial mall-hell thingy, and I wandered down to "Boylston St", which is a highway in its own right at that point, and started west. My old, crappy GPS didn't see much in the way of satellites, but I knew my turn-off to the south was Dudley Rd.

As I walked west, I noted the fence running down the middle of the divided highway. I really should have paid more attention to that. I only encountered one crossing, halfway to Dudley Rd... *including* Dudley Rd. Oops! Backtrack, cross, walk west again. Finally.

The second photo of the gallery is there to commemorate my learning two lessons:

Cross highways as soon as possible, you may not get another chance
Dial down the flash when photographing retroreflective materials

Dudley Road had some pretty fancy houses on it. I must have looked pretty out of place, walking at night in the snow along the road. I finally found the field I had forgotten to look for and wandered up the shared driveway... and damn, rhododendrons. A big pile of them, covered in snow, at night, in front of someone's house. I wasn't going to stomp around, breaking plants and getting covered in slush and maybe freaking someone out, so I called it a night and trudged back the way I had come. And you know? It was really pretty out, with the light snowfall -- I hadn't noticed so much on the way to the hashpoint.

Photos

Waiting for the bus
2 lessons learned
Rhodo-blocked
And "no trespassing"
Not making it, the tracklog edition
At least it was snowing


Wed 29 Feb 2012 in 42,-71: 42.3129303, -71.1794689 geohashing.info google osm bing/os kml crox