2010-12-02 48 9

Location

Pliezhausen, a snowy meadow orchard

Participants

Ekorren was there in the afternoon.

Expedition

Under normal conditions, this would have been an easy bike hash - about an hour per direction, just down along the Neckar bike trail and then up through the village of Pliezhausen. However, these weren't normal conditions: Lots of snow, and the bike trails are usually not cleared. Also, between Tübingen and Pliezhausen it's not possible to reroute over a normal road in case the bike trail is impassable - because there is no such road in the valley. There's only the B27 highway, which is a motorway on this section.

Pliezhausen once was part of the district of Tübingen, and at that time there was a direct bus connection. After it got reassigned to the district of Reutlingen, the bus got cancelled, and since then people need to go via Reutlingen, which is a significant detour. However, there was a reason why I wanted to go to Reutlingen one of these days anyway, and it was even reasonable to make it this day, and going by train and bus - well, it's the same daypass to go to Pliezhausen as to Reutlingen. So I bought that and went off, without consulting a timetable. Those buses will go often enough during the day.

Got off the train at Reutlingen and at the bus stop I saw the airport express bus just arriving. This one doesn't stop at the closest stop to the hash, but one further - however, it's a bit faster than the normal bus, and it went just now, so I jumped on, went to the industrial area and walked back into the direction of the hash. When it was time to leave ways and walk out into the mostly untouched white mess that covered the hash meadow, there were... footsteps. Footsteps? To the hash? Is there another active hasher in this graticule or what had happened here?

There isn't - at least I assume so. The footsteps went straight up and missed the hash by about 10 m, and there was no indication that the owner of the feet had stopped anywhere close.

Now, time for a snowman! I almost failed with that because the snow was not sticky at all, and it was really difficult to get it into any shape without it crumbling to dust immediately again. No nice result. But it's a snowman, and that's what counts. Added a hardly readable marker by trampling letters into the snow, then left and went looking for a closer bus stop. When I found it a bus back to Reutlingen was bound to come in only a few minutes. I wasn't as lucky later the day - at some time in the afternoon I had to wait half an hour until a bus really approached that was expected after ten minutes...