06-Apr-2015 -- I was in Minneapolis visiting my sister, Elizabeth and her family. We just got back from a three-day trip to the Wisconsin Dells where we went to the Kalahari Water and Theme Park. I just had a bit of time and thought I'd check to see if there was a confluence nearby. Turns out there is! This one was 20 miles away from her house and conveniently located near a restaurant where we planned to meet my cousin Tod Sherman that evening for dinner at the tasty Good Earth Restaurant.

We picked up my 11-year old niece, Olivia, from the bus stop and then headed to the confluence with Siri guiding us on the iPhone. 20 minutes on the road and we were pulling up to house where is was located. Google Maps shows the confluence to be in the middle of the house so we were joking that we would have to knock on the owners door and ask if the have a ladder so we can get on their roof.

The property with the confluence has a chain link fence around it and and we were joking that it was probably to keep all the confluence hunters out. Olivia and I got the GPS out and we walking along the fence try to find the closest point. This was both Olivia's and Elizabeth's first confluence, so I was showing her how to use the GPS, follow the arrow and try to get the distance to the point as low as possible.

Just as we are getting it to the shortest distance from outside the fence, the owner pops out of his house and calls to us, “Hey, are you looking for 45N 93W?” I answered, “Yeah, how did you know?” He then invited us to come on his property, and said “It's right over there by the pine tree.” We thanked him and came on his property with Olivia leading the way with the GPS.

If you ever done confluencing with other people with their own GPS's you know that the zeroing out of each GPS will usually happen at slightly different places. The property owner was motioning us to the pine tree, but our GPS was pointing to a location a few meters away from it. Rather than create a scene, we just quickly got the GPS to within 0.1" and took a photo of it, then quickly did the NSEW photo set so we could get off his property as quickly as possible. As we were finishing up, the owners were leaving their house, and we gave them big waves and thank yous.

This great because I got to introduce my niece, Olivia, and my sister, Elizabeth to the world of confluencing.

I named this the Slam Dunk Confluence with Friendly Property Owners.