The White House Commune Goes Hashing...

Due to restrictions on households mingling, much of the world had to switch to “virtual hashing.” Unlike many virtual club gatherings, such as for the American Women’s Club, this didn’t mean online. Instead, either a hare would lay a trail and hashers would run it on their own sometime that day, or hashers would just run on their own for a reasonable distance so their run could count. Then everyone would meet up that evening on a Zoom call. We considered ourselves very lucky because there were six hashers in our household, so we could still do live trails as long as we were somewhat discrete. Our first was on March 29, while other hashers were doing a Virtual AH3 Hash in Amsterdam.

Opee laid a fun trail that included a lot of back alleys around our neighborhood. 

A bunch of kids made arrows around his arrows in one section of the trail, which messed us up for about 15 minutes. Surprisingly, this was the only time that this has ever happened to us. 

In an effort to be discrete, he had us crawl underneath a bridge to have our beer break. 

This was only Bjarne’s second hash, but he seemed to enjoy it. 

On the next Sunday, only Opee and I were in the mood to do another Virtual AH3 Hash, so we just went for our own run. A nice bonus was that Ashlynn, Bjarne and Kati were having a picnic along the Vliet, so we had an impromptu drink stop in both directions. 

The following day was Brett’s 23rd birthday. When we asked him what he wanted to do, he answered, “Hash” (not that he had a lot of options, but we were still impressed with his answer), so Opee set a trail for the three of us. For his birthday dinner, he requested real mac and cheese, so we had to make a separate vegan batch for Veronica and Ashlynn. For dessert, Veronica made a yummy key lime pie. After dinner we had a video call with his parents and twin sister (silly Ashlynn had asked if they were identical) in San Diego.  

Ashlynn and Bjarne were willing to join us a few days later when Opee hared our first Virtual FILTH H3.

That Sunday, Opee laid a Virtual BMPH3 trail for the four of us (again Ashlynn and Bjarne opted out). As you might have surmised, we were actually hashing more often during the early days of lockdown than we normally did as we could also run with the Brussels Manneke Piss H3 from afar. It definitely helped that the weather was incredible.