2011-10-21 49 8

Location

In the woods at the border between Heidelberg's city districts Altstadt and Weststadt.

Participants

Karl_77

and, independently,

ilpadre

Expedition

Karl_77

After an appointment in Heidelberg Kirchheim I checked my Geohash app on my phone and discovered that the hashpoint was very close to my current location. I had to take it! So I got on my bike and went up a hill to the hash point. It was pretty steep and it was very cold. I didn't want to drive a detour with my bike and went the last meters on foot, cutting my way through the trees. In the woods the GPS signal became pretty bad as it was pretty foggy. I almost gave up because two of my programs showed me totally different goals but then finally the GPS signal got a lot better and I was able to find the hashpoint. You can see me stray around in my tracklog. I found an old busted can near the hashpoint and took it to the next trash can on my way back, getting the geotrash achievement. Although it was very cold and I ran around in the wood for quite a long time, I really enjoyed this one. It's too bad I missed ilpadre!

ilpadre

With a distance of only 2 km from where I live, and a very high probability of reachable coordinates, I just had to go there. I usually would have tried to get several achievements (e.g., try a Tron achievement), but since I was still fighting a tonsilitis (and several other infections as a byproduct), I didn't even know if it would be sensible to try an expedition at all the evening before. Luckily, I had no fever on the day of the expedition, so I decided that a really slow walk in the cold, foggy air of incoming winter could do no harm.

After a short walk through streets sided by many pretty 19th-century houses, I passed the Bergfriedhof, Heidelberg's famous and beautiful cemetery (I've visited it many times, but not this day). I reached the last house on the Steigerweg ("climber's way", it leads up towards the Odenwald hills and gets really steep at times). This point also marks the border of the city district I live in. I followed a path (a really bad trail more or less exclusively used and probably even created by countless mountain bikers) towards the hashpoint. I still managed to lose my direction a few times, unnecessarily leaving the path. On the way back I found out that OSM was right: You can conveniently reach the hashpoint without ever leaving that trail.

I found the hash tree, with GPS reception being surprisingly good despite fog and foliage, and left one of my wooden signs. A Short, but fun expedition.