Friday 24 September 2010

Coasting along the coast

This always promised to be an interesting hash, with one prior haring between the three hares, Hot Pants, Flashdancer and Ana Viana, and they did not disappoint. Having to improvise in the absence of strings and chalk, they ingeniously used coloured crayons and wrapping ribbon. Fão and Ofir looked somewhat as though a great, disparate childrens' party had recently taken place: all that was missing were sticky blobs of cake and puddles of sugar-infused vomit. Looking at one or two of the hashers I thought we might get some of the latter anyway, but, fortunately we were spared that delight.
We set off down the river bank before heading through the town and towards Ofir, banging along the boardwalk for a while before passing the shrine of St Michael - otherwise known as Hard Drive's summer house - and hitting the sandy woodland that leads to the centre of Ofir. Obligatory beach work spread us out but gave ample opportunity to disrupt the beachlovers' peace. Soon afterwards, we sort of convened for a pit stop, only moments before some local picknickers made off with the stashed goodies, just to discover that we had no corkscrew with which to open the bottles of vinho verde. Fortunately, half the Minho had decided to have a picnic in that half a square mile of sand and pine trees, so we were able to get some assistance.
The return saw about four different routes taken, three separate ones by the hares themselves, but at least we were there, for leisurely down-downs including one for her 190th birthday.
With trepidation we then acknowledged that the next hash is to be by Brunei Babe and Inaction Man around Valongo again.
Until then,
On, on

Wednesday 8 September 2010

There and back (nearly) and there again and back again.

What can you do? You leave a bunch of hashers alone for five minutes and look what happens...

It was a Friday evening, and a reverse pursuit was the plan - that is, I would set the hash a little bit ahead of time, the group would set off without me and had to try to get round before I caught them up. The trouble is, this is PH3, so there was lateness and people convening in the wrong place to contend with, before everyone rushed past the first checkpoint and the unexpected confusion of some signs left over from June. It all meant that as I headed back to the start, a little on the weary side, who should appear but Horny, the Hot Pants, then Tongue Fu and the rest? Going the wrong way, many leagues from where they should have been at that stage.

Anyway, nearly an hour behind schedule, we were on track, heading through the back streets of Cedofeita and Lapa, a soon strung-out group that took some co-ordinating to keep together. Having re-joined everyone, I had to join them through the stinking, rubbish strewn field behind Lapa metro stop, something I had had no intention of repeating on my catch-up run.

Leaky bladders were a feature of this one, Brunei Babe, Tongue Fu and Wundermuff all stopping for relief on the way round, and Titchy Percy got his titchy percy out with minimum discretion beside the road. Curious old ladies lined the route, but at least they were out of scaring range when we arrived at an OAPs' home for the hash viewpoint (a rather pleasant vista of the Arrabida bridge), which wasn't the case when I had come by earlier. For a moment I had thought I had seen Bunbasher and Wally chewing the fat, but I was mistaken.