Tasty teamed with Foxy and engineered a set up which relied on hashers not being halfminds. The harebrief detailed precise distances for a myriad of choices between 2.something and 10k. Clearly a lot of work had gone into setting it up! After 5 minutes of harebrief, I’m not sure I knew what was going on, but for sure it sounded like we should be following white paper on the longer run.
We set off back around the lake, and didn’t see anything until a blob of powder and then a circle in powder. I checked over the road and found a nice looking trail between a couple of quarries. Emmaroid was following and when we found some powder we were confused. Emmaroid picked some up and sniffed it like a DEA agent. Unconvinced we didn’t call for quite a while – he ran on another 100m or so to find some paper, so the pack were someway back, and confused, from the start. It didn’t take long for them to catch up though as the 2nd check must have been nearly 200m before powder. I’d checked the right way first, but gave up after 150m or so. When it was eventually called nobody was quite sure where we were supposed to go, but we grouped up heading along the side of a canal.
A split gave walkers the option of following pink paper, while for the runners it was also a check. One of the problems of doing Wimp/Rambos is that it takes out a check opportunity, but here the hares had creatively combined a split with a circle check. Most understood what was supposed to happen, but there were a few stood around confused. Next was the family of cows that really didn’t appreciate being tied up on a narrow path with a bunch of crazy colourful hashers running at them. They were terrifiedly spooked when I passed, so I hope the rest made it through.
Another check crossed the canal and Sloppy found trail over a concrete weir that needed good balance. Not having it I went around and rejoined the pack at the next check, which for some reason took us out into the rice paddies. I felt bad enough trampling on the poor farmers field, but worse when he came out to find out why the hell a crazy bunch of foreigners had suddenly decided to destroy his crop. Not good. I think Sloppy was conscientious enough to go back and all the way around to avoid causing more damage. Sticking a circle check in the middle of a rice field and expecting hashers to scatter everywhere?!
I was happy to finally be out of the ricefield, and we got to a circle where the run imploded. Nobody imagined we should go back into the ricefield and destroy more of it! Everybody was relieved to be out of the field and checked each way along the road – even running on road would be better! With everywhere being checked thoroughly (except back into the rice field), Graven and I spotted something white across another field closer to the hills and headed off to investigate. It was white, it was paper, but it wasn’t hash paper. We were a long way from the circle, but still nobody had called it. We headed along the trail to the right and spotted Turkish beelining across the field with intent, saying nothing. It was trademark Turkey silent running, so we headed to intercept getting to a circle 40m behind him as he called “CIRCLE CHECK!!!”.
It took some time to understand from Turkey that he hadn’t been on paper, he’d just seen the check from a long way away. And by the time we figured out we had got to the check from the wrong place, the pack was already headed our way. It didn’t take long to solve, so I found myself at the front running back along the bottom of the hill on a nice pleasant trail, unaware of how much of the trail we had skipped.
A couple of checks later I stumbled on the hares at a warm beer stop. Warm beer and a cross check. I managed to find 2 false trails, including one at the top of a nasty steep cliff climb. Ack, I should have just had a warm beer instead! I cut across and rejoined Graven when we got to yet another choice. We could do the wimp trail which by now was surely already kicked out, or we could stick with white paper and head on in to the cold beer. It didn’t take too much thinking!
My head is still trying to get its way around the complexities of the run, or perhaps it is just trying to recover from a night out with Belly Dancer..!