2009-01-08 49 9

Location

Today's location is in a field near Würzburg's suburb Rottenbauer. The region is Germany:Bavaria (EU:DE:BY), altitude about 280 m.

Expedition

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When the Cold Geohash temperature went to -9.4°C one month ago, I lost all hope to beat it, because it very rarely gets this cold where I live. But thanks to the recent weather extremes (and no russian natural gas to heat with), it had been down to -11 in the last days. When today's hashpoint fell within reach and the weather forecast gave a minimum temperature of -10, I decided to go for that record.

I got up at 6:40 (the earliest time for months), put on as many layers of clothes as possible and went to the tram station. 40 minutes later, I arrived at the other end of the tram line and went on by foot. The sky was beginning to clear up (sunrise at ~~7:02~~ 8:16 local time. D*mn. Why is the time given in UTC? How will I get a sunrise geohash now?) while I walked along snow-covered fields on a frozen dirt track to the hashpoint.

At the hashpoint I waited for the thermometer to slowly drop to -9.2, then -9.4 (tie), then -9.5 (record broken!). One minute later while I was taking pictures it finally went to -9.6°C. Happy, I started to walk back. 100 m later, just when I wanted to pack the thermometer away, it even showed -9.7°C.

Back at the tram station I remembered building a snowman and writing "xkcd" in the snow, but it was too late now. Thanks to 5 layers of clothing, I wasn't cold during the expedition, except for my right ear lobe (insufficient cap coverage) and my right hand (no glove during picture-taking). It's a public transport geohash and I walked about 3.8 km. Official weather station temperature for 8am was -9.8°C (on another hill), it had been 1 K colder at 4am.