It finally happened: there was a hash in my neighborhood, and it wasn't even a NASS! Crofty laid a trail through the finest industrial grit in the entire borough of Brooklyn.

I showed up to the start on Driggs Avenue in Williamsburg just in time to see a goodsized pack about to leave. Our numbers included returners Ariane (from Belgium) and Steve Brett (from Hoboken). Aleks brought Alix who brought Kathy, and Liz was back, with another virgin (Jess) she could lose on trail, and we had a good turnout by Brooklyn regulars (who should know better), like Paul and Joyce and John Burke.

Crofty pointed us off into the abyss of warehouses on the other side of Bedford and then we drifted into Greenpoint. The great thing about hashing in your own neighborhood, if your neighborhood is Greenpoint, is you get to go places that you normally are too afraid to venture near. Although if something bad did happen, hashers would just watch and say, oh, she just got hit by a bottle thrown from a passing car-I guess we better not go over there. Which is exactly what I was worried about as I checked through abandoned warehouses and down assassin-friendly dead ends with way too much East River access and far too many chalk marks.
Oh, Crofty managed to take us near all the nice parts of Greenpoint: outer Greenpoint, inner Greenpoint, the tip of the Pulaski bridge, my apartment, the post office, the library, the perpetual sidewalk construction. The only scenic opportunities our hare missed were the guy who quacks like a duck and the sewage plant.

We ventured back through deep Greenpoint, where merchants' signs are in Polish and Spanish but not English, and where there are too many cars, too many uneven sidewalks, and too many old ladies with grocery carts, until we were lost on McGuiness Boulevard. While the pack griped and wrung our hands, Lesley found trail down the median of the boulevard, and Peter and I followed, flanking her from opposite sidewalks. She looked like she knew what she was doing, but perhaps she was only following Sucks' phantom whistles. In due time, I saw real trail, which headed toward the obligatory check at the edge of McCarren park. In keeping with the industrial theme, there was no need to leave the concrete sidewalk and actually run on anything soft, like a running track or even asphalt. Soon we came upon The Abbey, where our hare, Ariane, and Jerry were happily chugging beer, the latter two having slyly agreed to "help with bags" in exchange for earlier access to beer.

Downdowns were awarded to returners, to the various virgins, and probably for some crimes, which I've managed to forget. Crofty was nice enough to try to feed us new food: burritos, perhaps to prepare us for the coming Cinco de Mayo hashfest.

I left early, for once, with Alice savoring the opportunity to practice her French on Ariane, and whatever debauchery happened after that has been kept secret from me.