2012-07-25 30 -82

Expedition

The Plan

In a park near Ocean Pond. Bit of a misnomer, that. It might be Olustee Battlefield Historic State Park, but I can't tell from the signs on the satellite images. It's been a good six weeks since we've been able to get to a geohash, so we're a bit antsy and excited about even getting to go on an adventure. The plan is to hopefully beat the majority of rush hour traffic out to I-10 west, which should be smooth sailing from then on. I'm a bit concerned about the road the hash is supposedly on, but it looks like it's part of a looping trail, so I don't think there should be too many problems.

The Geohashers

Geoff
Erica

The Adventure

Once again, though we supposedly made it to the hash, this was largely a failure.

We took off early and managed to beat traffic, for the most part. We also ran into a thunderstorm that we thought might plague the adventure, but any rain fizzled out in seconds. It was mainly one to see and hear, not drown in. As we pulled up to the state park, it looked very nice, and the view to the pond looked like it would afford some great pictures... if we could get that close.

As soon as we got out of the car, we were swarmed by the Florida state bird - mosquitoes. We figured since it was a five minute walk, we could keep a strong pace and oh come on, who am I kidding. The trail that was supposed to lead us straight was an abandoned railroad, which would've been interesting if we weren't eaten alive, and if there weren't a walkway stopping us from just jumping over. Technically it wasn't stopping us, but we remembered better. We followed the walkway around just to lead into a dead end, got a picture and got the hell out.

Now, the path that was supposed to lead around the corner and to the hash was a bust, but thankfully it was also met by another road we had passed. So we got back in the car and went that way, reaching the hash according to the GPS... except for the part where it stopped updating as we approached it. We got a picture from where it was and, exasperated, made our way back to Jacksonville. The GPS didn't start updating our position until we were too far away to properly care. The hashpoint matched what we saw in satellite images, so I'm tentatively declaring a technical success. We left the Three of Diamonds without tacking it up. We got a staple gun, but it was unloaded during our flight from mosquitoes, and in a moment of prescience, we decided we didn't really want anyone to know we were there.

We considered going for GeoSquishies, but at that point we just wanted to get home. A moratorium is being declared on state parks until mosquitoes piss the hell off. I wouldn't be surprised if it put a damper on future long expeditions.