2023-11-14 -35 140

Location

A field just north of Coombe, South Australia

Participants

Pwc (talk)
Pwc's boss
Pwc's co-worker (stayed in the car)

Plans

I had a work conference in Adelaide so needed to get their from Melbourne. Myself, my boss and a coworker decided to drive. I sneakily reviewed the hashpoints in each graticule we were passing through and identified this as the most practical. Still... to convince others to make a detour during a six hour drive requires a degree of subtlety and cunning.

Expedition

Myself, my boss and a co-worker met in Ballarat to drive to Adelaide. The hashpoint I was thinking of was several hundred kilometres away, and neither of my colleagues had previously been introduced to geohashing. Therefore I planned my pitch carefully: I waited until we were 15 minutes away, told them about geohashing, and appealed to their FOMO. They are used to me saying weird and/or lunatic things and therefore agreed to undertake at least reconnaissance of the area.

A rogue freight train cuts off our initial approach to the hashpoint

Obviously at this point my phone GPS stopped working, so I had to dust off my map-reading skills to figure out where to make the turnoff. We turned off the road in the right place, and then had to cross train tracks. The rail line, which we could see from the road and which had been empty for the preceding four hours, immediately produced a long freight train that took some time to pass. This did not endear my colleagues to the concept.

We then drove along towards the closest on-road point to the hash. On the way we saw a very promising-looking opening in the fence, about 800 metres from the hashpoint, which would lend a patina of credibility to the idea public access was permitted to the field. My co-worker decided to guard the car (so, as my phone’s GPS was unreliable, I confiscated his phone [a] for hash-locating purposes, and [b] to discourage him from driving away without us), while my boss and I set off towards the hashpoint. We got about twenty metres before realising the field we were in had some sort of grain, possibly wheat. It seemed undesirable to damage crops—even in the service of geohashing—so we retreated for another approach, continuing along the road until the absolute closest point.

This turned out to be at the fence between two fields. One was the wheatfield; while the other (which contained the hashpoint) was guarded by cows. I declared further progress impossible, that the cows were dangerous and that our only option was to declare failure and turn around. My boss however assured me that it was safe and that it would be nothing like “the time [my boss] had to run through a field being chased by a bull and ran into an electric fence”. I hadn’t even thought of electric fences and this new danger, along with snakes, was added to my fears.

My shoe after the geohashing and some attempts to clean it

As a compromise, I entered the wheat field and walked along the fence, while my boss walked in the cow field. While neither field was designed to be walked through, the wheat field was considerably worse and was only barely compatible with my shoes. The cows, by contrast, were docile and headed away as we approached. The wheat field was also unfortunate because I then had to cross another fence to get into the cow field and head to the hashpoint. The fence was an electric fence. Thankfully empirical testing determined it was not energised.

Me and my boss at the hashpoint

After locating the safest and easiest crossing point, we managed to both be in the same field, and were only a couple of hundred metres from the hashpoint. The final approach was uneventful, except that it started raining and we had to dodge a lot of cow dung. We made it to the point, although unfortunately had not brought celebratory beers.