2022-03-04 51 4
| Fri 4 Mar 2022 in 51,4: 51.2649185, 4.3861008 geohashing.info google osm bing/os kml crox |
Location
on a parking lot in the port of Antwerp, Belgium
Participants
Plans (log from September)
After hashing in Rotterdam two days previously, I was in Antwerp that day, and this hash seemed excellent – accessible on a parking space in Europe's second biggest port and only 6.5 km from the city centre. I made plans to go there in the afternoon before I had a remote meeting with my pen and paper group to play D&D. I visited much of the interesting city, including the impressive Plantin-Moretus printing museum, and only really looked up how to rent a bike when the time came. It is now half a year ago, and I don't recall exactly what happened, but I tried for what must have been at least half an hour to rent one of the city bikes (they were very expensive if wanted to rent for more than 30 minutes for some reason), and then to buy a ticket for the bus online. Both times I had to deal with terrible websites and missing information, and in the end my payment was not accepted for some reason.
I then decided to just get on a bus that would get me near the hash, but I had wasted so much time trying to get a bike or ticket, and the buses ran somewhat infrequently, so that I had to run through an entire pedestrian area to the main bus station to catch the last bus that would ensure I got back in time for my meeting. I duly arrived at the bus stop, but there on a sign stood the doom to my expedition: due to construction work, the bus line takes a different route (and it didn't even say which). I tried for some time to find out where the buses went from, and did some other research into how to get to hash, but it was all too late. I had to scrap the expedition. Which is a huge shame, because I really wanted to get a look at the port (I'd seen it from the distance on top of the Museum aan de Stroom a few hours earlier), and it also would have been my first hash in Belgium. Because I had planned to make it to the hash and taken the first steps to get there, this does technically count as an expedition rather than a Did not attempt, even though it was foiled at its very start.
