2008-10-20 52 13

Participants

relet and his sturdy bicycle.

Expedition

Day five of the consecutive geohash. Having recovered from my typers neuritis, I assumed it safe to ride my bike again. Even more so, as today's hash lay in the forests to the north east of Berlin. I have passed by that area before on a longer bike hash, and knew the road well.

I just had to wait for a parcel to arrive at my place, then left at half past one in the afternoon. There was much less wind than the last time, and I took a picture of the helicopter at the firefighter museum I meant to photograph the other day. Things progressed smoothly until Marwitz, where I had to leave the charted land to cross a few fields towards the forest. Fortunately there was a path - albeit very rocky - which led in the general direction. Apparently, there is some restaurant of a name someplace in the forest. One car was going the same direction.

In the forest, the tracks became worse. Moreover, I often chose the more direct route over the better accessible one, to keep closer to the hash's heading. I saw lots of camouflaged hunting stands (I wonder why they have to camo them here, and not elsewhere - I wouldn't think that wooden stands stand out in the forest that much.) One's net featured a funny sign, saying that in order to find your camouflage net after you have hidden something below, the net had some marker. I wasn't sure if the sign itself was the marker, or anything else.

Eventually, I reached the hash. It was in a forest of Scots pines, and marked by a heap of wood. I took some of the wood to form the letters XKCD. Then, I went on to hide a geocache I had brought. Since there are many wild boars in the forest, it's not exactly safe to store it near the ground - hence, I had to backtrack a bit, until I found the perfect climbing tree. That's geohashflashcache #9, for the record.

I took a different route back, mainly because there were some more interesting caches on the way. And by the time I had discovered some, I figured I could as well take the other road. I cycled alongside another cyclist during most of the way back, which was a rather interesting experiment for me: He used lots of bicycle paths, and rarely stopped at red lights. I usually don't use cycle lanes (they're not mandatory, and quite dangerous at intersections) and generally behave like a motorist (stopping at red lights, turning left directly instead of making a hook turn, etc.). Nonetheless we travelled the whole trip up until Jungfernheide station (rather close to where I was heading to) basically together.

Last photo shows me salty, exhausted, but happy.

Tracklog

http://www.everytrail.com/view_trip.php?trip_id=66345 (70km)

Photos

Gallery

helicopter crossed my path at an intersection.
the long, rocky road to hashity.
the hunting posts in this area were camouflaged.
but how to find a camouflaged hunting post? that's how! smart hunters!
the long, loggy road to hashity.
someones trailer?
kept bumping into these.
bike waiting while I strolled through the forest.
at the hash, in the forest.
there was wood.
and trenches.
logs make for good hashmarks.
stupid grin and autumn forest.
a cache.
looking down on the forest.
autumn trees.
tired biker, back at home.


Mon 20 Oct 2008 in 52,13: 52.6689202, 13.0933991 geohashing.info google osm bing/os kml crox