I like to believe I burst through the doors, Kramer-style, but that’s probably not how it happened. Probably, I burst through the doors in a Sonja’s-just-eaten-pancakes-style. Because I’d just eaten pancakes.

“BIF! Where do you want to go today?”

I forget Bif’s exact response; a few days later when I asked her to remember she said, “You said, ‘What are your plans for today?!” and I said, “I don’t have any plans…mumble mumble.'”

I suggested going somewhere totally random.

Bif suggested geohashing, which she learned about from a web-comic. This seemed right up my alley, even though I don’t like the expression “right up your alley.”

After spending a lot of time finding our coordinates on Google Earth (only to realize, duh, the GPS could’ve told us) in order to learn which graticule* we belonged to, we received the day’s random coordinates. Unfortunately, the coordinates were in the middle of Long Island Sound. Fortunately, I paid attention in math class.

I’ll detail our steps, in case you want to have a totally random adventure of your own, or just marvel at our skillz.

I take that back. I tried detailing our steps, but there wasn’t enough humor in geographical coordinates and random number generators. The end result is that we had a set of random coordinates within Connecticut, but not within Long Island Sound.

We entered the coordinates into the GPS, slid in a CD of what turned out to be all of Queen’s worst songs and we were off!

As we began driving, we realized we needed to decide what to do when we reached our destination, wherever it was. Would it be enough to jump up and shout hooray? If it were a store, should we make a purchase? If it were a restaurant, should we eat lunch? If it were a house, should we ring the doorbell? Bif said, “Yes, and we could pretend we were, ummm, conducting a survey to, ahhh…” I said, “No.”
And what would we do if we couldn’t reach our destination, like if it were in the middle of a lake, or a bear-infested forest? “What if our final destination is just a point in the road?” I wanted to know, as the GPS indicated five remaining minutes and we turned from one highway to another.

“We pull over.” “On this road?” “Well…”
And we had to decide what to do if our destination made us uncomfortable. What lengths were we willing to go to for the sake of adventure? “I mean, obviously we’re not going someplace dangerous,” I began, “but where do we draw the line, exactly?”

“Lingerie shops.”

“Really?? No. We are not drawing the line at lingerie.”

“But it’ll be awkward.”

“First of all, no it won’t be, second of all, awkwardness doesn’t matter. We can handle awkwardness. I mean, in terms of sketchiness, where do we draw the line?”

“A seven.”

“On a scale from one to ten? What’s a ten?”

Then followed an amusing conversation that I’ve been forbidden from recounting due to remembering it completely wrong.

“Drug dealing homeless people in a dark alley that smells like pee? Okay, I agree, that can be a ten.”
As it turned out,  our worrying was for naught. Our destination turned out to be a drug-free, lingerie-free, quiet, suburban house. Totally ordinary, except for the fact that there were miniature gourds hanging from the tree in the front yard.

Tree with gourds not pictured.

As we wandered the neighborhood, other peculiarities emerged. I pretended I was a reporter, and dictated notes into my iPod’s voice recorder. “A yellow house with an overly landscaped front yard. Some kind of tree trimmed to look like a French poodle.”

“Topiary,” Bif replied, even though I wasn’t talking to her, “But it looks more like a chess piece.”

The next house had a row of cement figurines. Cement girls, boys, geese, cats, frogs…twenty-two of them. Twenty-two total figurines, that is, not twenty-two cement frogs—although that would have been even better.
There is a house with a poster-board pumpkin staked into the ground and another with a pumpkin patch in the backyard. Bif said the neighborhood was “neat because it’s very residential without being one of those development complexes.” I thought the neighborhood was neat because everyone in it seems to have forgotten Halloween ended a month and a half ago. Then we began to encounter some Christmas decorations: a snowman wind-chime; a tree with ten metallic balls hanging from bare branches; a house with windows spray-painted white to represent snow; a lawn decoration depicting a penguin, a seal and a snowman riding a roller coaster; and other things of that nature.
Our tour of the neighborhood complete, we decided to browse the GPS list of nearby attractions. Our options were: Jake’s Hamburgers, Bob’s Coffee Shop, Sav-A-Step Food Mart, CVS/Pharmacy, Suburban Liquor Shop, Big Y, Gorilla Florists, Golden Opportunities Jewelers, Card Smart and Elizabeth’s Restaurant.

But just before we drove away from the gourd-tree house, we spotted the owner: a dark-haired man in a khaki trench coat. Bif says it was technically a sports coat, but I say that doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

*Graticule may refer to:

• An oscilloscope graticule scale
• Another name for the reticle pattern in an optical instrument
• The grid used in the Geographic coordinate system