Baldrick as a hare – I’ve not done one of his runs before, but I was assured he knew what he was doing by Skid Mark at the hash pub the night before – strangely Skid Mark wasn’t there…
A rambled hare brief set us off with the promise of around 3-4km ahead. We took off running with Brown Finger and I setting a blistering early pace on the tarmac. We may as well right? It’s a short run, and we’re on flat road! Oops! It turns out the hare had his poker face on, or in other words, was full of shit! 3 or 4km turned out to be 3+4=7km for those lucky enough to find a short trail, and 9.5km for those who found a different trail.
The paper was sparse with an environmentally friendly hare cautious about putting more than 1 stamp sized piece of paper per 500m or so. A lot of guess work was involved. Rather than heading into the usual valley, we turned right, so that we could stay on the road – perhaps the hare was a bit scared of leaving the roads? A short climb up the stairs past a temple took us to the point of confusion. Being that deep into the run, we all wanted to head back towards home, and it was only Brown Finger who reluctantly checked left. You could hear the joy in his voice when he called us On! By then we were already making our way along the wrong side of the canal, so carried along. When I found a circle check I headed out into a construction site, finding occasional papers, and calling confidently enough to bring Chuck Wao and Dead Virgin along with me. Eventually we gave up on trail – it was too patchy, so we cut through a rice field to the road. When we hit the road we found Brown Finger and Graven Image, and trail!!!!
A bit of a climb over another ridge, past another temple, and back down… At least I saw the On-In, and finally I could hit the beers. Eventually everyone else trailed in covered in mud from their own stories. The circle was slow starting, but turned into an absolute classic. Dead Virgin and I took longer to recover from the pain of laughing so hard than it took recovering from the terrible run!