2009-03-28 48 11

In an inaccessible parking lot (well, more like a private dump for rusty buses and other large vehicles) between Feldmoching and Hasenbergl, in the north of Munich. Zb and dawidi had planned to meet there around 16:45.

Planning

Saturday Meetup in Hasenbergl, everyone! We probably won't get into the exact place where the trucks are parked, but getting to somewhere around the fence of that thing will count, I guess.--Zb 19:22, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

Kinda hard to tell if it's fenced... on Live Maps' bird's eye view I don't see a gate or fence - so it could be accessible. I'm currently trying to come up with a reason not to grab a BayernTicket Single and go there in the afternoon... ;) If what appears to be meadows around the location are really meadows, I might even bring my paraplane and take aerial pics of the hash! --dawidi 20:42, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

So... are we gonna do this? If so, when exactly? 16:00? Anyone else coming? (I'm still undecided... it's a 20€ trip after all) I'm hanging out in #geohashing for further discussion. --dawidi 09:17, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

4pm won't work, but I might make it before 5pm. (No pun intended.) --Zb 10:00, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

I'm ok with 5pm too - but I'll only go if I can be sure I won't be there all by myself. --dawidi 10:55, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

The weather is supposed to stay nice until the evening, and I'm in a nearby place anyway this afternoon, so yes, I'm going. ETA 1645 or 1700. Might be nice if some others went as well, though, because I'll bring a deck of Schafkopf cards, so 4 would be the perfect number.--Zb 11:06, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

OK then... I'll be arriving in München-Feldmoching at 16:18, so we'll probably get to the spot around the same time. I'm not versed in card games, though (at least not the "classic" German/Bavarian ones). (Also, still trying to decide ~~what to wear~~ whether to bring the paraplane or the quadrocopter -.-)

argh, that expedition was a fail on so many levels... i'm sorry i didn't get there at the planned time :-( details to follow in the writeup. --dawidi 20:55, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

Zb's expedition

Föhn and sunshine at Noon

Around Noon, the weather looked really promising from the comfort of my apartment. The Föhn was supposed to end in the late afternoon (and you can already see some clouds in the distance to the North-West), but my guess was it would remain nice until 7pm or something.

V_R reached, I'm determined to go. I had stuff to do South of Munich's Olympic Park until 4pm, but it wasn't far from there to the geohash.

Munich's Nordring cargo railway line, on the way to the geohash.
Rain, a bridge and a solar panel with no sun.

It had started to rain around 3pm, but once you are past V_R, sticking to your plans is safer than stopping. As you can see in the pictures, rain doesn't exactly add to the beauty of Munich's Northern parts.

Just some meters East of the geohash location. You know you are in the North of Munich when you see this side of the not-exactly-pretty O2 building.
There are better locations for taking pictures of Munich's Olympic Tower.

Ladies and gentlemen, my pretty Holland bike:

The method of transportation.
Almost the same type of footwear for the bike and the geohasher.

It was in really bad shape when I got it from a colleague at my former company last December, but I fixed it and now it is really fun to ride. 'Free' bikes like these are so much better than new cheapo bikes (see also: ICWB as in User:Robyn/Incredibly Crappy Walmart Bicycle)

The geohash is inside of the fenced lot, roughly at the front of the green bus.
Weird. You don't expect signs like these on buses in Germany, and there were at least four of these buses inside of the fence.

Fail. The spot is inside of the fence. See dawidi's pictures for more details of the fence. I got there at 5pm and rode my bike around the spot for maybe 10 minutes to see if anyone was there.

Some apartment buildings NNW of the geohash, but still no fellow geohasher.
Wow. Pheasants.

Isn't this amazing? These birds were pretty. Were it not for the rain, the picture with the pheasants might be truly awesome and full of bright colors.

Anyhow. Since dawidi said he was coming from the S-Bahn station in Feldmoching, I thought his train may have been late and he might be on the way, so I rode to the station to see if I could find anyone looking like a geohasher.

Baureihe 229 of DB Netz, nicknamed U-Boot.
Baureihe 111 with a regional train

I found no geohasher, but a really rare thing none the less. The yellow engine is a class 229, ex-DR, nicknamed U-Boot (submarine), of wikipedia fame. There ain't many of these left; most have already gone to the junkyard and only some are still used for construction work by DB Netz, the company who owns the rails and infrastructure of Deutsche Bahn. I was really surprised to see it. The red train is funny because double-decker cars and regular, older cars are mixed. At least train nerds like me think this is funny.

Once again, back to the geohash location. Still, no one there who looks like a geohasher. Here's one more picture, though:

Sledding signs are a sad sight when no snow is around.

Is anyone familiar with the Calvin & Hobbes comics where they sit on a sled, in the rain, and wonder when they will have snow again? This situation felt exactly like one of these comics. See also: 2009-04-04 48 8 by Ekorren.

I stuck my map to a tree just in case dawidi might still come to the spot and I left around 5:30pm because dinner time was getting closer and closer.

All in all, a failure, technically, because the location was fenced and the attending geohashers haven't met, but: If it were for guaranteed success, it wouldn't be an adventure, right?

What's also stupid: Had we reached the spot, this would have been a Bicycle Geohash and a No Batteries Geohash.

dawidi's expedition

Argh... a failure on so many levels, but at least nobody was hurt...

I had planned to bring my paraplane to the meetup so I could take aerial pictures of the coordinates and do a Proxy Geohash at least, in case we couldn't get into the parking lot. However, it looked windy at noon, so I decided I would take my quadrocopter instead. I had to do some maintenance on it first, but that went rather quickly. However... as always, I failed to actually get going at a reasonably early time, so I had just a little over half an hour to buy something to eat (I hadn't had lunch yet), buy tickets, and get to the correct platform before the train left. That all worked out, but as I was a mere couple of seconds too late, the doors were already locked, and the train left without me.

I would have given up and gone home at that point if I hadn't already bought the tickets. So I wandered around the station for a while until I found a bank indoors where I could park my bike and eat the food I had bought. (If I had not bought the food, I would have made it to the station in time, but my stomach insisted on getting lunch.) The next connection to Munich an hour later was, however, not a regular "RegionalExpress" but an "ALEX" - which means it doesn't have the modern, spacious double-decker waggons (with wide doors and large bicycle spaces) that are a joy to travel by bike in, but rather poorly refurbished, repainted, narrow, rickety 1970s waggons which are absolutely horrible to have to use with a bike.

Both bike spaces (there's space for *two* bikes per train!) were taken already, so I put mine in some other corner and since there was no space left for me and my bags, I had to sit in a compartment at the other end of the waggon. Because of the awkward geometry of the waggon, I underestimated the angle to lean my bike against the wall, and it promptly fell over in the first curve. I guess I'm lucky... nobody got hurt and I haven't found any damage on my bike either. For the rest of the ride, I stood next to the bike to watch it, even though my bags were still in the compartment.

In Freising, I got out of the ugly train to wait for the next S-Bahn to take me the last 25km to Feldmoching. It was already past 17:00 and it had started to rain - so I knew there would be no flying for me today. After getting off the S-Bahn, cycling to the hash was not a big deal anymore (it turned out to be on a one-way road leading in the wrong direction, but I didn't care).

Of course, by now, it was around 17:50, and Zb had left already. I found a damp mail envelope with a hand-drawn map of the surrounding roads, stuck to a tree, which I assume he had put there as a marker. I didn't get closer than about 20m to the hash, because the parking lot/dump turned out to be fenced - this fence was quite visible on the older Google's satellite images, but not at all discernable on Microsoft's (newer) aerial images. I wandered around it and photographed the property in all its hideous glory of rusting buses, stacked containers and miscellaneous garbage from all sides.

Not too long afterwards, I was on my way to Munich's central station. I found one geocache along the way. At least I arrived at the train in time, and this time it was a nice shiny RegionalExpress (even almost entirely without soccer fans and drunk people!), so the ride back home was more relaxed... and I got a couple of good laughs from an episode of my favorite podcast which I listened to on the ride.

All in all, it was a failure as a meetup (which was my fault), a failure as a geohash (inaccessible location), and a failure as an expedition (ugly weather, nothing particularly interesting discovered, stressful journey)... but... well... it did keep me busy ;-)

View of the property from the southeast.
dawidi at the gate. The hash should be on the other side of the gray bus.
Access denied.
Distance from the gate.
Looking south from just west of the property.
Zb's hand-drawn map I found stuck to a tree.


Sat 28 Mar 2009 in 48,11: 48.2044679, 11.5471750 geohashing.info google osm bing/os kml crox