2015-03-15 50 8
| Sun 15 Mar 2015 in 50,8: 50.0847603, 8.4831429 geohashing.info google osm bing/os kml crox |
Contents
Location
In a residential area close to Frankfurt airport.
Participants
Plans
Take the early flight from Helsinki to Frankfurt, walk or take a train to hashpoint.
Expedition
I woke up at around 03:20 before the alarm clock. Apparently knowing that you'll have to wake up so close to your usual bedtime doesn't help sleeping well. After a 1 h 20 min long bus trip I finally found myself at the airport well on time. Probably even too early; after all a geohashing expedition doesn't require any checked baggage so there wasn't any reason to be early -- if the security guys don't suspect anything. I don't want to be one of those people (called normal?) who take selfies at the airport, or even worse, ask somebody to take pictures of them, so you don't get to see any pictures of me waiting.
Nevertheless, the sunrise I saw while waiting at the airport is probably one of the most beautiful I've ever seen, so at that point I knew I had made the right choice. No, my potato wouldn't do justice to nature so you have nothing to see here. Everything seemed to be going smoothly when the plane departed at 07:10...
...but when it landed in Frankfurt at around 9:00 local time, it was raining. Well, I didn't come this far from the past winter in Finland to be afraid of a little rain, so I decided to embark to my journey still. However, walking to an unknown location didn't seem so tempting anymore. So I took a train. And because I found the local public transport system very confusing, I ended up buying the wrong ticket on the first try. The S-trains took me via the central railway station to Kriftel, which seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. From there I started walking without knowing what to expect. When closing in on the target, I was met by this view:
I had no experience in taking photos with the tablet so my finger was blocking the lens. Another try gave me this:
Well, it's a wall and walls are made for going around so around I went. And met a fence, of which I apparently didn't take any photos. Finally I was on the other side of the target but there didn't seem to be any reasonable path to the hashpoint, and the place looked like they don't want any strangers from the Internet in their backyard. Probably in Finland I'd have tried, knowing that I can always talk myself out of trouble, but I didn't want to get into trouble in foreign soil, so I aborted the mission. Internet points are nothing compared to the experience of walking alone in a random place, so I don't feel particularly bad of the missed opportunity. So I felt great when I continued my way to the conference I was originally going to---you didn't think I'd really do all this just for geohashing, did you?
User:JiK with a grin even more twisted than usually.
Close but no cigar.
GPS track from Sports Tracker.
