18-Jan-2013 -- Although I now live in Northern Colorado, I grew up in Medina County so this was an appropriate confluence to be my first. I had heard about the project from Ken Jenning’s book Maphead. My wife and I were flying home to Ohio in mid-January for a late Christmas celebration with our family and decided to hit this one up on the way east from my sister’s place in Ada (Ohio Northern University) to my parents’ place in Granger Twp. Route 30 to I-71 put us right by this one, and the Pilot station that the confluence is behind even had the cheapest gas so we probably would’ve been there anyway. Yahtzee!

The temperature was 33 degrees F when we parked the car in front of the attached Wendy’s; we were hoping it’d be below freezing so the ground behind the gas station where the confluence is located would be frozen. Luckily the ground wasn’t too flooded as my sister and I trudged the couple hundred feet through the dry grass stalks and pricker bushes. My wife wasn’t about to meander through the mud in nice clothes so she just watched us from among the parked semis where the pavement ended.

With my wife’s iPhone and my sister’s iPhone we watched on our GPS Device Data apps while the lats and lons clicked closer and closer to 0 from the .999s and the finally crossed over. We spent five minutes with both phones trying to zero out the readings but kept having issues with the signal and overcompensation. Eventually we settled on a spot that we thought was closest to where our reading had been lowest and set the phones down for a picture, both with separate readings. After doing the calculations, the difference was a little over 7 meters for both, with 5 meter GPS accuracy, so it’s unlikely that the photo was at the exact confluence. However, we covered enough territory right around that area that we’re pretty sure we had to have accidentally nicked it as least once! Upon returning we couldn’t find my wife at first and were worried she had been abducted by a rogue trucker, but turns out she had just gone inside to warm up.

This was a fun confluence visit, albeit hardly having to journey to reach it and despite not getting a perfect GPS reading. I am hoping to get an actual GPS device for my birthday in April, and I’m sure this was just the first of many to come for us.