2024-02-22 -37 145

Thu 22 Feb 2024 in -37,145: -37.7034110, 145.1618220 geohashing.info google osm bing/os kml crox

Location

On the nature strip of a vetinary hospital in Eltham North.

Participants

• John
• Stevage
• KT

Expedition 1

It was forecast to be a hot day today, and so it turned out to be.

John decided to train to the hash, partly for that reason, but also because his bike was getting serviced.

He arrived at the hash at 12:30pm. Success!

• 

  John at the hash

Expedition 2 (Steve and KT)

The irrelevant bit

It was one of those hot Melbourne summer days I loathe so much. A day for hiding in a cool place, or maybe going for a swim up in the river in Eltham. But not geohashing. Unless the geohash is also in Eltham.

After doing much hiding in a cool place, we transferred to a cool place on wheels around 4, and drove to the place known as Laughing Waters.

A few weeks earlier we had done a rather under-prepared float down past this place around the famous Pound Bend - you park, scramble down a steep path, float for a bit, then eventually arrive at a point at the bottom of different but equally short and steep path back to your car. Two things we had overlooked: most people do this on a floating device, and it takes around 3 hours - not the 20 minutes we were imagining. We did it with a pool noodle and a life jacket. KT still bore the scratches and bruises from a couple of particularly rough encounters with rocks.

So anyway, Laughing Waters. Actually one of the scariest bits to float through, just a small rapids, but when you have absolutely no idea what's going to hit you next under the surface, strong currents get a bit terrifying.

After a few tetchy misnavigations, we made our way to a rocky platform in the river. The weather had turned...strange. It was hot and muggy, but now cloudy, and the sky was thick with some kind of dust or smoke. Better than sun at any rate.

We had a swim, a people-watch, a book-read, a beer-drink, a dog-play and a too-long-conversation with a mum and tot. Finally it started to rain a bit, so we decided it was time for the point of this write-up, the geohashing bit.

The geohashing bit

The hash was just 4km away, a quick drive. I bit more miscommunication over where we should park, and we ended up parking at a servo and walking the 80m from there.

Except we didn't. We walked the 80m from there, but since neither of us was actually paying any attention to the app, or really focusing on the job at hand, we kept walking.

I grumbled about how far we'd parked from the geohash, to which KT pointed out that walking is nice, which is of course true. I looked briefly at the app, and noticed that the distance to the point seemed even higher than it was before, but didn't think much of it.

We walked on a bit. It was now 300m to the point. This was getting annoying. As if the more we walked, the higher the number was getting. How would we ever get there?

At this point, KT had a sudden flash of realisation. "Steve, are we walking the wrong direction?"

So we were.

So we turned around, and revisited the point, which was right on the footpath in front of one of the fences that we have all seen but I don't know how to describe: made of a zillions of thin sticks bundled closely together.

• 

  Stevage and KT at the hash

More irrelevant bit

It was now time for fish and chips, which we suddenly realised was available just across the road from the servo we had parked at. Clearly we should have ordered first before the side-trip, like my first geohash in Williamstown. But alas.

We felt a bit odd leaving the car at the servo, so embarked on a complex and confusing manoeuvre in which the car travelled hundreds of metres in order to end up about 20m from where it started.

We ordered fish and chips. While waiting, we noticed two awfully verbosely written signs which didn't seem to say much, with a lot of redundant repetition of words that just said the same thing over and over again while repeating things they had previously said and not adding any more information, and expressing the same thing in slightly different words without any further ideas being added which would have warranted the addition of these needless and extraneous sentences. As an obviously very non-verbose person myself, this bothered me. Eventually I concluded they were probably written by ChatGPT. I'm not sure if that made it better or worse.

• 

We retired with our dinner to a nearby reserve, where we ruminated on the difference between a park and a reserve, complained about yellow chips, complained about my objection to chicken salt, rejoiced in the cool change and drove home.

• 

  Stevage and KT at the hash

• 

  F&Cs. You can see the hash directly past the tunnel in the background.

Achievements

John earned the Public transport geohash achievement by reaching the (-37, 145) geohash on 2024-02-22 using public transit.