2010-08-28 47 -122

The hashpoint was by the utility boxes in front of this house.

Location

Off a residential street in Parkland, south of Tacoma.

Participants

OtherJack

Michael5000

Plans

OtherJack

I'm going to bike there, be there at 4pm, and take my bike back on the Sound Transit 594, if all goes well. I might check out the PLU campus beforehand if I've got time.

Expedition

This may have been one of the easiest geohashes ever, logistically speaking at least. While biking down on a beautiful late-summer Saturday, I stopped in downtown Puyallup to buy and eat a second lunch, rest up, and figure out my route up onto South Hill, to find that a flea market was going on in the park that day, with convenient food carts. Not a minute after I bought my kielbasa and chips and sat down on the grass to eat them, a middle-aged fellow walked up to me and said, "You look like you're on a bike ride and you're eating your lunch and planning your route!" or something hilariously close to that. When I confirmed this, he asked where I was trying to go and immediately and enthusiastically offered his route advice. It was a climb that I never would have come up with from the map I had, but worked great and probably saved me five minutes and a lot of effort.

After a few steep short hills and some flats on the excellent east-west road the man had recommended, I arrived in front of the house that Google Maps had presented the hashpoint as being on the property of at 4:05pm. (Unfortunately, I did not know about Michael5000's plans, or I'd have left earlier and met him!) I immediately sat down on the gravel by the roadside to stretch, catch my breath, and get the GPS going, and think about what I was going to tell the inhabitants. When the satellites had all locked, I paged over to the lat/lon to find that I was no more than a few feet south of the GPS hashpoint! I literally just had to stretch out my arm from where I was sitting and put the thing down on the gravel slightly closer to the property's front fence, and it nailed the coordinates. How convenient.

The 594 and bike ride home were beautiful and uneventful.

Michael5000

I changed into running gear at a gas station off of I-5, then parked at Pacific Lutheran University at 2:10 p.m., did a lap around a nearby track, then set off for ground zero. It was in the parking strip of 118th, and I stopped and retied my shoelaces at the hashpoint. After that, I rambled through the neighborhood for a while before finishing the run on the nice campus of PLU.

After finishing the run, I drove up to the area and went to an estate sale across the street from the hashpoint. "Mom was 82, hon," said the woman running the sale. "She didn't have a lot of 'guy stuff.'" And this was true.