2019-08-22 54 19

Location

on a harvested field near Elbląg, Poland

Participants

Leidenfrost (talk)
π π π (talk)

Expedition

π π π (log from April 2020)

While on a 37-day round trip around the Baltic Sea, Leidenfrost and I decided not to go out of our way to reach geohashes, because then that would be all we're doing. But we wanted to do the ones that were convenient and only implied short detours.

The first such presented itself to us on 22 August, three days after setting off, near Elbląg in Poland. We started in Gdańsk in the morning and took most of the day to visit Malbork Castle, the biggest castle in the world by land area. We had already booked our Airbnb in Kaliningrad, but on the way there we would drive right by the hash (2 km away), so it was only a 15-minute detour in driving. We parked at the main street in the village of Nowina, but were told by residents that we shouldn't park there because of the police, and were allowed to park on lawn in frost of their fence. We tried to walk the last 450 m to the hash, but we had to pass the house of the owner of the field in which the hashpoint lay, and it had a dog that barked very loudly as we approached while the farmer was working in the back garden. He came around the house two times to calm the dog down while we hid out of sight. Not wanting to alert him and explain our situation, we tried to go another way, but there was another house that overlooked the whole field and whose occupants would definitely have seen us sneak past and walk over the field. So went back to dog, waited for a good moment (it was barking the whole time), then hurried past and hoped the farmer wouldn't trust his dog after it had seemingly barked two false alarms. We're not sure if he saw us (he def could've), but at least he didn't approach us. So we walked 170 m in the forest a the edge of the field before entering and searching for the right spot, in clear from both houses and gardens.

That's how we unlocked our first graticule. Then we went back (the dog was now inside) and drove off. Later in the day, we visited Frambork, the continued to the border and were let into Russia after four hours of waiting, arriving in Kaliningrad at night.