2021-10-18 42 -71

Location

Through the woods near a reservation in Andover, MA.

Participants

Expedition

Since I've moved to the Commonwealth, as I'm sure a grand total of 2 Massachusetts residents refer to the state as, I've had the chance to do a geohash in the busy vicinity of Boston, but never in the quaint Massachusetts countryside. I missed the days of wandering through the wilderness when I was geohashing in New York, though, so I was very happy that today's geohash would allow me to venture into the woods once again. It was a little bit of a drive from my office, and it definitely made the drive home longer, but I was lucky that it was early enough in the fall where there would still be a little bit of light left for my expedition.

I parked at a surprisingly busy dog park and took a moment to enjoy all the different pups running around and sniffing each other's butts. It looked like paradise, personally. The trail leading into the woods was just on the other side of the road, and as I walked by there were many of the rock walls that are so ubiquitous in my area of the country and provide a benign element of mystery to walks like these. After a few minutes, I ventured off the path, and was lucky to find that the ground was almost completely dry, which was nice since I had not worn shoes anywhere near capable of trudging to the average geohash spot. In this case, I kept walking further and further into the undeveloped reservation, since the map on my phone kept changing its mind over where I actually was. I had enough light where I wasn't desperate to locate myself and get the heck out of dodge, but my ears were a bit chilled at this point, so it was nice when I finally narrowed down the spot to a pile of branches near a small clump of thin trees. I savored my quick moment of triumph, headed back towards the path, and enjoyed the longer ride home with the afterglow that always comes from a successful expedition. It helped ease the sting of a somewhat difficult Monday back in the office, so I'm hoping I get the chance to do more daylight expeditions in October and November to offset tough workdays ahead. Hopefully there won't be a need to, but you never know.

Photos

Just picture a bunch of very excited dogs as the audio background for this pic.
The only decent picture I got in the fading light.
You can just see the scale of the map fading away. I was pretty close.
Another classically British town name in Mass. Go figure.
Here's the actual spot, it's pretty indistinguishable from the rest of the pretty woods.