2009-10-10 42 -83

From Geohashing
Sat 10 Oct 2009 in Detroit:
42.4970651, -83.3456340
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About

The day's hash was located on the athletic complex at Harrison High School in Farmington Hills, Michigan.

Expedition

excellentdude: Computer issues once again took me on the road to an Apple store. This time I went to the one in the mall at Sterling Heights. When checking the day's geohash coordinates, I discovered that I would drive right past the Detroit graticule's hash on the way to the mall. I decided I would definitely have to try to hit that one on the way back. When I zoomed in with the satellite view, I saw the hash was in a high school football stadium with several tennis courts nearby. My girlfriend had played tennis when she was younger, and we'd been talking about taking it up together for awhile. So, she grabbed her racket and some balls, I bought a racket on the way out of East Lansing, and off we went.

At the Apple store, I was successful in purchasing a Time Capsule (and later, at home, backing up my ailing hard drive). From there, it was less than a 20-minute drive over surface streets to the hash. We arrived a bit after 3:30pm. It was a beautiful day. The Harrison High School marching band was practicing on the football field, and some other people were leisurely walking around the track. Since it was a bit before 4pm when we arrived, Julie and I hung out and listened to the band for a bit. We were hoping more people might show up to the hash at 4pm. At about 3:50, we decided to head in the direction of the hash. It was on the sidewalk right outside the track and very easily accessible. We got there, got our GPS reading, and took some of the usual pictures. Between forgetting where the sun was and closing our eyes, it took us five tries to get a decent picture of ourselves at the hash! From there, we proceeded to the tennis courts. The whole time we played, we kept an eye out to see if anyone else visited the hash since it was a great location for a Saturday meetup, but no one did. Since neither of us had played tennis in a long while, we just hit balls back and forth until we lost them all, then retrieved them and repeated the process. We eventually got into enough of a rhythm that I suggested we play an actual two game set. Of course, Julie won the match 2-0 to take a 1-0 lead in our all time series.  :-) When we were done, a few drops started falling from the sky. The timing worked out perfectly as we ended up leaving just as it started raining. This was one of the easiest and most enjoyable hashes I've been on yet!

Achievements

Landgeohash.png
excellentdude earned the Land geohash achievement
by reaching the (42, -83) geohash on 2009-10-10.
Centurion0.png
excellentdude earned the xkcd Nullaturion achievement
by attending 2 Saturday meetups.

Photos