2016-08-13 51 6

Location

In a forest near Baarlo, Netherlands.

Participants

Meta-alt

Plans

Take the train to Venlo then walk. Buy postcards and send them to my geohash friends. Go home the same way I returned but with a Stupid Grin™.

Expedition

As a US-American, I find the idea of a convenient day-trip to another country quite... foreign. So when I saw that there was a doable geohash not so far from Venlo, the Dutch terminus of a train line also serving my current hometown of Wuppertal, this became very tempting.

I had a bit of time before the train left (at 11:25), so I walked around Wuppertal and saw that one of the cafés had a special 5% discount for Pokémon trainers. Unfortunately, it wasn't advertising a similar offer for geohashers. The train ride to Venlo was easy and uneventful, except for some loud guys going around trying to sell prosecco.

When I got off (at 12:56), I noticed that all the advertisements and signs had seemingly magically turned into Dutch. Luckily, German and Dutch are quite close, so they were not also magically rendered illegible. (Listening was tougher though.) I took out my trusty phone and started following the Google Maps directions I'd saved (I wasn't going to buy an international data plan for one day). Everything was going smoothly until about 429m in, when it told me to take the 5th exit of a roundabout with 5 streets. Hmm. I took the 4th exit and hereupon entrusted my guidance to a compass and OpenStreetMap screenshots. I effectively made a U-turn and went to the other side of the roundabout.

This roundabout also gloriously demonstrated the biggest difference I noticed between the Netherlands and Germany, namely a big culture of biking! On one side of the roundabout was a big bike parking station, and by each of the streets was a red-colored bike lane or bike path. There is also a nice "fietsknooppuntennetwerk" (good to know they have long words here too), a network of numbered bicycle intersections, which makes it easy to go all over the place on bike paths without getting lost. (Later wikipedia research tells me this exists in parts of Germany too.)

After a while, I found myself in Hout-Blerick, a nicely gardened suburbian neighborhood with streets named after the Romans: I walked along Cicerolaan to an intersection with Nervalaan and Traianuslaan then turned onto Romeinerweg (which later turns into Legioenweg). This leads out of the neighborhood and more Dutchly, along a grassy dike, on which I walked and found some mushrooms, including a bolete that "stains when injured", on which I drew a face.

After that, I got onto a country road; many of them have bike lanes but no middle line to divide traffic.

I then reached central Baarlo, continued, encountered a moose crossing sign, and finally reached the forest with the hashpoint. I took my "proof" picture, which is not great but the best I could do without GPS, and then tried to find the hashpoint counting steps. I was ready to give up when I realized I couldn't wander off the paths, but I was quite lucky, because the hashpoint happened to lie on a small path not on the map. (I would have liked to do the OpenStreetMap Achievement if I had a tracklog. Then again, maybe this path wasn't supposed to be there, and then this would turn into a problem of prescriptivist vs. descriptivist mapmaking.) In any case, I got there, stupidly grinned, realized there were mosquitoes, and got out fast.

On my way back, I learned that horse neighing seems to be contagious. There were lots of horses around in the farmland. Also, there was a nature preserve by the river which looks like a prairie but more purple, and it has cows in it (or at least that's what it looked like to a non-biologist). Back in central Baarlo, I couldn't find any postcards, and by the time I got back to Venlo, it was nice to walk around, but any stores that might have postcards were also closed. Nevertheless, it was a long day and a great day.