2010-01-30 -37 144

Location

In a field just south of the Puckapanyal military base, close to Heathcote and Tooborac, Victoria

Participants

Plans

Head to the hashpoint en route on a road trip; hope there's a farmer nearby to give us access to the field. Day one of a two-day road trip.

Expedition

Road trip!

We were heading to a small town north of the New South Wales border, so naturally before making any rash decisions like committing to an arrival time or figuring out if the car needed gas, I got onto the Geohash wiki and checked out the accessibility of todays hashes.

with the graticule high in the north-east, the graticule west of my home was up for exploration. Closer inspection showed that the point was in the middle of a field just south of a military base close to the border. Not much of a detour off our route, but just as we left home my partner informed me we had to arrive in NSW by early afternoon for an appointment, preventing a lengthy stay and explore of the area.

Heathcote, which isn't too far north of where we were, has gained a bit of press recently after a millionaire member of the Rockefeller family (apparently unrelated to the Rockefellers of North America) went missing between the airport and his home in Melbourne during the week. The police were out in force in Heathcote earlier in the week searching for his body. Not sure if there's an award for geohashing under the guise of helping a current police investigation.

Once again, private property prevented us from getting to the actual physical hash point. It's a cause of some frustration; in a lot of the cases where the hash falls onto some farmer's property way out in the wops, it's impossible to tell who's property it is and therefore who too ask if you can access their land. I've yet to see a kindly farmer ploughing a field nearby who can authorise access.

I'm a property owner myself and as such am loathe to trespass on somebody else's, and I grew up in the country, so am even more loathe to trespass on fields with livestock in them. So, despite the fact I could clearly see the hashpoint and could have easily jumped the fence and walked 90m to the point without anyone being the wiser, I did not.

I did however collect one very small piece of geotrash and took a panorama of the sunburnt field in which the hashpoint sat.

There was another hashpoint further north in the Deniliquin graticule, but it would've involved at least an hour's detour which didn't fit in with the schedule.