GFH3 Run #1,717; 21 September 2013

Hands up if you ate so bloody much pizza, in response to Hash Hero Chugger's pleas, that you may never walk again.  Pity, because the walking around Chugger's place in Great Falls is lovely, even in intermittent showers that eventually (as today) settle down to a steady rain.  "We need this rain," Rough Cut pointed out, with truth if not originality.

And certainly the 20 or 25 hashers present today looked revived and refreshed and soaked through as they arrived, pretty well grouped together, back at the cool, dry garage they'd departed an hour or so earlier.  (Incidentally, the group included Mini Schlonga, back from interhashing through Europe.)  Chugger and Phoenix Rising are to thank for taking a lesson from last week and ensuring they placed checks everywhere there needed to be a check, and a few extra places, too.  That diligence kept the pack mostly packed as they raced along a mostly off-road trail.  As promised in the brief, they crossed no major roadways; "Springvale," Chugger clarified, "is not a major roadway."

Someone in this group is thinking, "Oho!  So we head west..."

The walkers split into two about-equal groups, one sticking to pavement (street-walkers, heh heh) while the other headed into the homeowners' association-maintained woodsy trail around a little pond and up a good hill and then the wrong direction somehow or other to miss the second part of the woods trail.  Oh, well.  Kylie and Abby don't like to stay out in the wet too long, anyway.

Back at the garage, there was a spread you wouldn't believe, with fancy sandwiches on seeded bread and ciabatta warm from the oven, and fruit and cheese and chips and homemade cole slaw (very excellent) and other salad-like items...  and those were the appetizers!  Dominos delivered about 1,000 pizzas minutes later, each one a different set of toppings, including fancy things like banana peppers and spinach, and mainstays like ham and pineapple and just pepperoni.  Easy Strider:  "Snausages!" (imagine boyish grin and thrilled intonation).  And only later did the dessert trays come out, laden with pastries.

Plus stacks and stacks of pizzas off the the right somewhere.

Mufti called the roll for this, run number 1717.  Get it?  The double 17s?  Ooooh.  PhR and Chugger and Trish got well-deserved applause, and while I didn't actually hear her, I can't imagine Paint in the Ass didn't urge everyone to make the trek to Maryland next Saturday.  It's a great location for both running and walking, and well worth the trip.

Along about 5pm, with Chugger urging people to take home some leftovers, PhR went out into the wet in his old Volvo to find Spurt.  The expletive-deleting rain had washed away some chalked X's, but not the mistakenly-laid, flour checks those X's were designed to keep people from finding.  So Spurt was way off where he shouldn't have been, and willing to take PhR's taxi service.  Remember, everyone, that sidewalk check is designed to wash away easily.  Anyway, Spurt should have worked up enough of an appetite on all that extra trail to take care of the extra pizza...

Here's what it looked like up until the camera battery died.