2015-11-08 46 19

Location

In a field in rural Hungary, closer to Szabadszállás than anywhere else of significance.

Participants

Plans

Take the train from the city out to the nearest station, walk from there a few miles to the hashpoint, then reverse. I bought train tickets the night before.

Expedition

The Kelebia train left Keleti station at 8:05. I made it there in time, despite a few moments of panic along the way when dealing with the less-comprehensive-than-usual Sunday public transit system, bearing the gyros I'd picked up for breakfast, which ended up being fairly disappointing. The trip out was slightly complicated by my inexperience traveling alone on a train system in a country where I barely speak the language, but nothing happened that graduated from a glitch to an actual problem.

Eventually, I made it to the station on the outskirts of the hamlet of Bösztör. I'm not sure why the train stops there. Sure, it provides car-free access to the rest of the world for the dozen or so houses that constitute the village, but the region that's significantly closer to the Bösztör station than to any other (about three miles along the track in each direction) doesn't seem to have anything else in it besides private farms and a single church. Maybe my intuition about the costs and benefits of routinely stopping a train is out of whack. Regardless, that three-mile radius does include the geohash, so the existence of the Bösztör stop was critical to my undertaking this expedition.

The route from the station to the geohash was muddy, understandably, as it had rained the previous day and was still foggy when I started the trek. It was also deserted by anyone more significant than some large brown birds with a high-pitched, throaty call. I didn't recognize them, but they looked like attractive hunting targets, so I suppose they could be pheasants. Most of the fields were fallow (we have already had frost in Budapest), so I had a better sense of my isolation than when among, say, California orchards. I was impressed.

The geohash was in a field, not on one of the tracks among them. The satellite imagery gave a different division of the plots than existed in actuality, so I couldn't be sure whether the point was in an irrigated field with plants still growing in it (I'm not sure what kind; maybe carrots, but I wouldn't expect those to be so bushy) or in the neighboring plowed field with a few green shoots in it (which could have been volunteer grass, but I didn't want to risk trampling fragile crops). Wandering around the edge didn't resolve the question. Then I thought that maybe the hashpoint was right on the boundary, which would really be lucky for me: by traversing the boundary, I wouldn't have to find footing among the bushy plants and the furrows between them, and I would avoid the new growth too.

So that's what I did, and I got pretty close. The geohash turned out to be slightly within the plowed field; even though I didn't walk out to its exact location, I'm counting this as a success.

I returned to the station, witnessing an impressive north-south cloud disparity and a bunch of chickens, and waited outside for the train back north. I would have waited inside, but when I opened the door I walked into what seemed to amount to the stationmaster's office, so I made a non-excuse excuse and backed out. I caught the train and made it to Budapest without incident.