2013-11-22 50 11

Location

200 meters into a muddy field near Mellingen, Thuringia.

Participants

Juja, Benjy and Frankie Mouse

Expedition

Today's point again fell into the category "too close to miss" - not considering that it's November and while in summer I could explain Geohashing even to my mother ("Sun is shining, so we're having a nice bike trip to some interesting place we've never been before!") now is the time I can't really explain it to myself. Why do I search invisible coordinates while it's wet and dark and uncomfortable outside, knowing that I'll probably end up dirty all over? I can't tell.

This could have been an early-morning-hash before work, and maybe like that it would have made some more sense, but early-morning-hashes require getting up early, which wasn't possible, I'm sorry. So I passed the day trying to persuade people to accompany me, without success. Fine, so I'll just go alone after work. And of course after work it's dark. And 100% humidity feels like rain anyway (or maybe it really was rain, who knows). And what did I expect the way to Großschwabhausen to look like after one week of rain? Well, it looked exactly like that. And soon I looked similar. In Großschwabhausen I got back on paved roads, but to keep up the difficulty level, some thick fog was added to the friendly climate, so now I only saw a useless light beam in front of me and lots of darkness. Somehow I still reached Mellingen where I cycled up a muddy way to the Geohash field.

Oh, I am so incredibly clever! 1) I brought plastic bags for my feet to keep my shoes clean. Good idea, bad execution: my plastic bags were covered in thick dirt after a few meters, and that heavy dirt ripped them eventually, allowing some dirt to still get in. I'm talking myself into believing it would have been still worse without the bags. 2) I always leave my bike lamp on in darkness so it's easy to find the way back to my bike again. Yeah, nice, but the fog eats all the light and so there was no bike and not even any light of Mellingen to be seen after I took ten steps forward. Luckily, the GPS also remembered...

I was satisfied with a 2m-shot and went back then - needless to say the way back was exactly the same idiocy (only more foggy). At home, the dirt-loving mouse finally had the courage to leave the backpack - that was too much even for Frankie!