Time for the AGFU, time to get rid of Skiddy…! A large crowd gathered in the hope of something better, having followed instructions more detailed than ever in Hash history – probably longer directions than this write up will be, to a run that was closer to the city than 90% of our runs! I thought HTT was my closest runsite, but nope, they’d found a busy market much closer to town to meet up.
Hare brief muddled through we jumped into the songthaews for transportation to the start of the run, with the hares doing a bad job of disguising the fact we were going to be running back to where we parked the cars. There was no disguising the fact that we were going to be swimming across the river. Some idle chat in the back of the songthaew was broken up when I spotted white paper out in the field just the other side of the river – confirmed by Humps, we had a good idea where the run was going.
Finally we were set loose back along the road and into a field. A circle check, and time for a protest. Having been accused of not doing a good FRB job, a few of us decided to, well resign as FRBs. Rather than suffer the wrath because we might not always get things perfectly, we decided to sit it out and wait for someone else to find the trail. And so it was, I Got Gas and HRA called the trail across the field, we kicked out the check as accurately as we could, and took off with the goal of catching them before the next check. We did, and enjoyed a pleasant sit down on a nice log.
At each of the checks the RA, Chuckie did an admirable job of marshalling the troops, to ensure all possible options were covered. Meanwhile Turkey was doing his fair share of checking along with Belly, HRA and Piggy. Turkey again resorted to underhand tactics on several occasions, and we were left at the check while he didn’t call on on – we needed to put out spotters to see if he started running or not.
A long way into the run and it was still Belly leading the way. You should have seen him when we could see paper off from a circle in a direction nobody had checked. It took years off him as he sprinted off. We waited for him to call to make sure the check was kicked out to international standards before chasing him down and letting him have the prime choice at the next check.
Finally we got to the river, the inevitable. Chuckie inevitably turned back to find the nearest bridge. We lost trail, and I ended up leading the way down to the river bank. Hacked through a tunnel of snake infested shitty stickers, to the water, and it was time to get wet. Some hashers took the short cut straight to the hares, while the rest of us went to a circle check on an island in the middle. It might have got a bit deep, but we all got across and trawled the short distance back up to the cars.
A very different running hash – I had fun, and hopefully a lot of other people had fun doing some checking too. On to the circle, where Skiddy sacked his team, and paved the way for……….. Frozen Dick to take over. Yes you read it right… I had every intention of heading home for an early night, but I ended up at the hash pub, and breaking curfew on the way home. Damn Junta, and damn it when I’m having too much fun…