2013-10-27 47 12

Expedition Report: DST Timetravel Pt.2

This is part two of a two part series describing an attempt to perform the DST Timetravel multihash achievement. For part one please take a look over here.

Location

The Rosenheim hashpoint: Behind the fence in the middle of the two white buildings.

The hashpoint was located in in the suburb Raubling some clicks outside of Rosenheim. While the area isn't densely populated the hashpoint of course had to fall into someone's garden. Oh my.

Participants

Patrizius && C.
B2c

Plans

Well, the plan was to get there as fast as possible, as the geohashers only had one hour to make it from the outskirts of Salzburg to this hashpoint. (For extensive planning details please check part one of the expedition report.)

Expedition

On the fast lane.

(continued from 2013-10-27 47 13 - remember, our merry bunch of geohashers still is in Salzburg at this time!) They drove down the hill as fast as the poor road condition and all the wet foliage would allow, slowly working their way through the Salzburg suburbs towards the A1 motorway, which would eventually merge into the A8 at the german border. As the minutes were ticking away and everbody was clenching their teeth, the Salzburg suburbs slowly crawled by in front of the windshield. When they finally passed the Salzburg city limits and hit the motorway they held their breath: the stopwatch showed that they were about a minute faster than while doing the dry-run a couple hours ago. Now the fat BMW could finally be at its best: going fast on a straight line. Even though the night was clear and the good weather held up, one could go only so fast on the A1, as the speed limit in Austria was lower and there were some construction sites which could only be passed slowly. That said the ride went pretty smooth for them at that point.

As they finally crossed the german border at Walserberg and entered the A8 the stopwatch still was below 20mins. Their hopes were slowly growing - they might really make it at this point! After that moment everything seemed like a blur for them, minutes and waypoints flying by as they raced through the pitch black night towards an imaginary goal that some algorithm had spat out a couple of days ago. But the time for such considerations had long gone by. Now they were determined to reach Rosenheim and get to the hashpoint in time. C. was double-checking their timing all the way and Patrizius was recalculating the remaining distance to get estimates on their ETA while B2c tried to stop blinking. At this point they had already travelled over 600km in 7 hours and although they were hyped it had been a long and straining night for them already...

As they took the motorway exit and finally approached the Rosenheim outskirts, the clock turned over and it was 02:00h again. Nine minutes to go. Frantically checking the stopwatch and trying not to miss any turns they drove through the Raubling suburbs. 6 minutes to the deadline they came to a halt at the back of the buildings they had scouted out some hours before, jumped out of the car and made their way through an old, overgrown access road towards the hashpoint.

Here is Patrizius' original post from the Geohash Droid app, originally creating this page as he was lying in wait with B2c in an overgrown access road just behind a garden shed. The geohash was only a couple of meters away!

Gg -- Patrizius (talk) @47.7883,12.0979 21:06, 26 October 2013 (EDT)

At that point they were truly relieved for the first time - they had made it! Now they only had to wait two more minutes, jump the fence, run over to the hashpoint, take some pics and get the h*** out of dodge. Suddenly Patrizius noticed that the GPS didn't show the correct time - for some reason it had ignored DST and showed them being one hour late! (Of course the damned thing would show the correct time exactly one hour later. WTF, Garmin?) Well at that point there wasn't much they could do about that. The clock hit 2:09h. They jumped the fence. The motion sensors turned on the exterior lighting. No turning back now.

Aftermath

After taking some pictures they quickly made their way back to the car and then, out of town. They still couldn't believe that they had pulled it off as they drove all the way back to Vienna. It had been a long day. An even longer night. After over 11 hours and more than 1000km of driving, waiting, running around in woods and on other people's property, they arrived in Vienna. Tired but happy they saw each other off and went for a good day's sleep.

Tracklog

Tracklog of the operation. The wiki doesn't allow upload of .kml files so i tried to visualize it as good as it gets with gpsvisualizer. File is available on request.

Thx go out to...

Big shoutout to Patrizius and C. for their support and willingness to join in on this thing. Without them this wouldn't have been possible. I mean, who in his right mind wants to be locked up for 10 hours strait in a car with some crazy guy racing from point A to B?
Whoever is in charge of the german autobahn: thanks for lifting that speed limit.
All those fellow techies out there who keep those servers running, satellites flying and phones working. Without you this probably would have been a pretty boring, forgotten 2 page memo that got shelfed in a filing cabinet a long time ago.
BMW's M60B40 for screwing up my CO2 footprint, but allowing us to reach the hash in time ;)
...and Randall Munroe / xkcd of course ;)

Achievements

Combined achievements for both of the 2013-10-27 47 13 and 2013-10-27 47 12 hashes:

B2c

This user earned the Land geohash achievement

by reaching the (47, 12) geohash on 2013-10-27.

B2c earned the Multihash Achievement

by reaching 2 hash points on 2013-10-27. It's a Double Hash.

B2c earned the Border geohash achievement

by crossing the Austria-Germany border on 2013-10-27 to reach the (47, 12) geohash.

B2c earned the Drag-along achievement

by dragging Patrizius to the (47, 13) geohash on 2013-10-27.

B2c earned the Earliest geohasher achievement

by arriving first at the (47, 12) geohash on 2013-10-27.

B2c earned the Time-Traveller Geohash Achievement

by reaching both the (47, 13) and (47, 12) geohashes exactly on 2013-10-27, at 02:09 AM.

B2c earned the XKCD-100 Honorable Mention Achievement

by voyaging 375km to reach the (47, 12) geohash on 2013-10-27. Alas it was not a Saturday.

Patrizius

Patrizius earned the Land geohash achievement

by reaching the (47, 12) geohash on 2013-10-27.

Patrizius earned the Multihash Achievement

by reaching 2 hash points on 2013-10-27. It's a Double Hash.

Patrizius earned the Border geohash achievement

by crossing the Austria-Germany border on 2013-10-27 to reach the (47, 12) geohash.

Patrizius earned the Drag-along achievement

by dragging C. to the (47, 12) geohash on 2013-10-27.

Patrizius earned the Earliest geohasher achievement

by arriving first at the (47, 13) geohash on 2013-10-27.

Patrizius earned the Time-Traveller Geohash Achievement