2012-06-17 41 -88

Location

About a hundred feet off a paved road inside Morton Arboretum.

Participants

Haberdasher

Plans

I've been looking for an excuse to go to the Morton Arboretum for a while now, and I think I finally found one. My family has a membership to it, which helps. It's on Father's Day, but since my father enjoys running on the arboretum paths and we have been wanting to go as a family for a while, he's willing to go along with it.

Expedition

Getting to the arboretum was easy enough, but it turns out our membership only covers two people, so the achievement changed from Restricted Area to Admit One. Close enough. And the arboretum forbid many usual geohashing activities- tree-climbing, kite-flying, use of novelty flying discs- but I made do.

It took a bit of driving around to get close to the hash, and I had to try three times before finding the closest place to the hash. My parents kept making jokes about the masses of other geohashers which were surely on their way to the hashpoint. Getting to the hash from there wasn't too tough, although I got a little scratched by what greenery I couldn't avoid. And the hash was in the sun, so it was even warmer than in the shade (not a record-breaker, but certainly in the 90s), and the sun's glare made the GPS picture a little hard to read, though not unsaveable as I first thought. At least it was in a field rather than in a wooded area- dodging the tall grasses was tough enough, dodging trees would've gotten me a ton of scratches (although at least then I would've been in the shade).

After that, we had less time than I expected, so my father didn't go running. Instead, I got a hashcard at the gift shop (sadly they didn't have any with a map of the arboretum so I could mark where the hash was, so I picked one with a field similar to the hashpoint), and then my parents sat in the shade and listened to an old-time mandolin band while I took a few more pictures. We ran a few errands on the way home, including dropping the hashcard off. A good time was had by all, despite the heat.