2015-08-19 51 0

Location

On the verge of the A127, north of Basildon

Participants

Huinesoron

Plans

So. The hashpoint is sitting on the grassy verge of the main road, within a few miles of my house. Even more spectacularly, it's only a few car-lengths from a gateway in which I could pull over.

But... I need to get home tonight. And this would add 20 minutes to my journey.

That's a lot of minutes for a 15-minute drive.

But... I have small children. And a wife who might need a break from them. And if I plan my route right, I could pull off a Tron achievement...

So... tempting...

... I'll see what she thinks.

Expedition

I raced home after work. My wife had agreed that I could take a stab at the hash, and bring the kids - but she was coming, too. I wasn't complaining!

I knew I was going to be trying for a Tron achievement, but that gave me a slight problem: the instructions say to drive into your road from the other end, but my road only has one end! (All right, if you want to get technical, the other end leads onto a footpath. I'm not driving down that.)

So I got sneaky. ^_^

One-ended roads are no problem.
Leaving through the front door...

I parked on a different road. Then my walking route took us out through the front door, along that footpath, and down through a completely different road to where the car waited. And... we were off!

("Daddy, where are we going?"

"We're not going anywhere, just for a drive and back home."

"But where are we going?")

The trip was simple enough. The A127 - the major road the hashpoint sat next to - was free-flowing, so I didn't even get stuck in traffic. I counted roads, watched out for road signs, and then - yep, there it is - pulled up alarmingly sharply onto the pavement by a gate I recognised from Google.

The hashpoint was just up ahead, about 20 meters. So I got out my GPS and HAHA no wait, I mean I paced out the distance to the hash and went and stood in the grass while my wife took long-distance pictures.

Google Streetview is a good way of locating yourself.
I found it! It's... a spot on the side of the road!

I made sure to loop round: I walked out to the hash on the pavement, then returned on the grass and walked around the back of the car to get to my seat. I wasn't going to lose out on a Tron on a technicality.

Then, to the utter bewilderment of my children, it was time to leave. Er... that's a lot of cars moving very fast...

Merging into this does not look like fun.

So yeah, merging back onto the A127 was one of the most nerve-wracking experiences of my life. 70mph from a standing start is... tricky.

And then I drove us home and that was that!

Yeah, right.

The plan called for me to drive straight through Basildon and join the A13 at Pitsea. Unfortunately, what I'd forgotten is that Basildon's town planners hate me even more than Rickmansworth's. Specifically, they desperately do not want me to find Pitsea. So I followed their signs through one roundabout, and a second... and then found they hadn't bothered to put any on the third, and that the only one anywhere nearby pointed in the opposite direction, and that the previous roundabout had mysteriously lost its sign in the last thirty seconds.

So I resorted to picking blindly. I had to hit something sometime, right?

("I think I'll go left, so I won't cross my own track."

"You know this is how we think men navigate all the time, right?")

So did I pull off the Tron, despite getting hopelessly lost?

Looks pretty Tronny...
Thank Whoever for dual carriageways!

Yes, I did! ^_^

The rest of the trip was simple: back home the easy way (I'd done the wiggly country roads on the way out, now I got to use the main road), parking in my actual road, and back home through the back door. Victory! Another hash successfully defeated!