Baltimore Annapolis Hash House Harriers

What an inspiring trail – so inspiring to cause us to name Sean on the spot!  But what can you say about a trail laid soley by a brand new hasher, and then QA’d by Amazon?  Well, I guess you can say "AMAZON TRAIL"!  We shoulda been nervous when Amazon said "Sean laid the whole thing, but I ran it for quality control and it is good to go!"  Actually it was a pretty damn good effort, but with slight but important details amiss.  Here is my version of the trail, which probably differs from 90% of the pack judging by arrival time to the finish! 

We started off with a check at the Johns Hopkins campus, where I was bringing up the rear as usual and observed 3 people checking and the rest of the pack following Bobbing for Buttplugs every time he called "on one…".  After 5 minutes Saintly Suds and I started checking and found trail.  Trail wound around on lawn and shiggy, sometimes suddenly swerving in another direction without warning.  We went through some parkland shiggy and followed trail to road, and marks suddenly ended.  Then Suds looked about 50 yards back from where we came down on the road and found a check; hmm, checks are usually on the trail, not backward from it!  We then found trail in the pristine (not!) stream which we followed for about a mile and through a tunnel, then got up a road.  At this point, there were about 20 people in the FRB crowd who soon disappeared from sight, and about 10 of us behind.  We arrived close to a popular swimming pool (so popular apparently they needed cops to do traffic control or curtail rioting) and found a blue arrow pointing into the woods.  Trail seemed to go to a homeless tent which was booby tracked with strings all around it.  Somebody found trail turning left into the shiggy but then lost trail.  Back up on the street, we looked 30 feet past the blue arrow on the sidewalk, and found a check.  This indicated to my half-mind that maybe the blue arrow was not true trail so the 10 of us spent about 25 minutes checking within a 1/2 mile radius of the swimming pool.  Finally an intrepid threesome entered the woods again and found the rest of the shiggy trail, but by then a small detachment had given up and made a bee-line straight back the start.  The 5 of us continued in full fledged shiggy for about 2 miles.  We finally got on a nice park trail where we could make a little time and then to light rail tracks.  At this point we had been on trail for over 2 hours; when we saw a true trail arrow indicating to go back into the shiggy, I declared I was going straight to the light rail stop 200 yards ahead and looking for trail and everybody opted for that, and sure enough we found trail on the road.  The bad news was we apparently missed a beer stop; the good news was we apparently missed another 6 miles of trail!  Trail followed city streets and a road construction area, and in a nice wooded park area with a stream, we found a BN mark with trail leading into bushes.  We looked all over but finding nothing, figured that we were so far behind everybody the BN was gone.  Another mile or so we came on in, with great assistance from Condom Driver (?), recently arrived from India to attend Johns Hopkins and knew every shortcut to the finish so we actually didn’t follow true trail the whole way; I think that may have been a good thing.  We arrived, fully expecting to be DFLs and circle to be half over, but finding only the early short-cutters that bailed at the pool, who had been back for about an hour.  Hmmm…where the hell were the 20 FRBs and the hares?  After a while Pony Boy and others showed up with a beer stop cooler and said they were going back to pick others up at the beer stop, and some FRBs came running in – Pro-Boner beat Bobbing by a hair.  By the way, the trail was so strenuous that it wore out the FRB Brick Bag Bobbing was carrying and Pony Boy had to buy a new one.  It was now about 6:30pm and we made our way into the bar having found an employee had opened it and was reluctantly serving us beer even though we didn’t have wristbands.  Boy was that Sierra Celebration yummy!!!  The rest of the pack finally made it from the Mystery Beer Stop from Hell and we enjoyed lounging around the various beds in this harem/opium den-like place.  Actually, it is called the Den.  Very nice! Circle commenced with the usual.  We had four virgins, and a lot of returning newbies.  And as stated earlier, Just Sean was honorated with his new identity, Regurga-sex, having puked on a babe while engaged in copulation.  We left with the party in full swing, so I am pretty sure everybody got their $10 worth of Celebration, and brain cells were dropping like flies and forgetting the pain of trail!  I am still not clear what happened between the Beer Stop from Hell and when we found trail at the rail stop.  The missing beer stop was explained – it actually wasn’t missing, it was just 200 yards from where the mark was.  So really, the trail could be tweaked a little to make it truly excellent, by putting checks ON the trail, and making sure shiggy is well marked by toilet paper or flour on trees, as flour tends to fall off bushes; especially if changing directions suddenly.  I guess better marked beer checks would be good.  Oh, and maybe cut the trail back to 6 miles instead of 12!  On On to enjoying more trails from R-S (and on afters!)  EZ Lipps