2025-07-04 53 9

Location

On the wildflower strip next to a corn field in Achim, Germany.

Participants

Plans

The overall plan was to attend a BBQ in our orchestra conductor's garden in Ottersberg on Thursday evening. And to get home somehow afterwards. While there is a frequent train connection between Oldenburg and Ottersberg, I would have been forced to leave the festivities quite early in order to catch the last train. To allow for more flexibility, I decided to take my bike on the train.

When the geohashes for 2025-07-03 were announced, I was disappointed. Nothing at all along the route. The hash for 2025-07-04, on the other hand, presented an almost optimal opportunity. Thus my plan became: train to Bremen, bike to Ottersberg. Enjoying the evening with lovely people, excellent food, and even something to drink. Bike to the hash at midnight. Bike to Oldenburg afterwards. Some sleep, work, weekend.

Expedition

Everything went as planned. But mistakes were made.

The first mistake was to even talk about my cycling plans at the BBQ. Reactions ranged from 'Why!?' through 'But you surely have an e-bike?' to 'Oh, in darkness this might take three hours' - the last one of course from an uber-athlete who presumably would have run the 86 kilometers in three hours. But they all agreed in encouraging me to continue sampling the delicious buffet. It really was delicious and I helped myself to much more servings than recommendable.

The second mistake was the beer. I really like beer, but it tends to make me tired. Drinking it after a long day of working, baking, and already having cycled 30 km from Bremen to Ottersberg, (not to mention gorging myself), is a beautiful way to end the day. As it was, it prepared me rather poorly for my trip to come. When the party was starting to wrap up, I mounted my bike and started my journey in a comfortable pace. There was more than an hour til midnight and only about 12 km to cover. I marveled at the colors of the still-not-quite-night sky and at the wide grass flats along the river Wümme. With more than 40 minutes to spare I reached the vicinity of the hash and decided to walk for a while on the deserted rural roads. Suddenly a car appeared, going even slower in the opposite direction and for several minutes I thought the driver would turn around and ask me some serious questions. But the car continued to crawl away and coincidentally took a right turn when I had to take a left. Consequently, we moved along in parallel with a field between us for a seemingly very long time. Finally, I had to stop and could watch the car lights disappear in slow motion.

Well, still 15 minutes until Friday. Now the sky was dark and I could see some stars. Several wind turbines around me made slowly swooshing sounds, somehow only amplyfing the peaceful setting. My tiredness became more confident and demanded some attention. I ignored it and made a couple of steps onto the grassy strip and took my time with the Geohash Droid app, trying to pinpoint the hash extraordinarily accurate. Finally, midnight came and I could record proof. Admittedly, I didn't wait very long for other geohashers to show up. Instead, I trudged to my bike and navigated between the fields and then along a larger road until I reached Achim. Achim has a train station and I was tempted to look for a late connection to Oldenburg via Bremen.

But due to my first mistake, there was a whole bunch of people expecting me to ride home. My pride wouldn't allow me to capitulate. Fortunately, there was no train. I rode on, towards Bremen. Then, across Bremen. While Bremen is the smallest federal state in Germany, as a town it is quite large. Still in the middle of Bremen, my wrists started to hurt (and wouldn't stop during the night), once again indicating that my bicycle's geometry is not optimal for long rides. I crossed the Weser and soon afterwards found a bike path to Delmenhorst. This led through more river flats that were covered in fog which made me cold. After a seemingly long ride I was sure to have reached Delmenhorst, but it was only another district of Bremen.

I previously lamented the difficulties of our bike path signage at night. After two or three misnavigations because of arrows that I overlooked, I decided to cling to the really big roads for the rest of the night. This worked out rather well. The overwhelming majority of car drivers was sensibly asleep and there was almost always a separate bike lane. Slowly, I made my way to Delmenhorst (only once again checking for train connections there ...) and reached the road locally known as 'old B75' that surprisingly has its own Wikipedia entry in English. But, more important, it is a very straight connection to Oldenburg and I could follow it without any navigational effort. This I did. More and more slowly and very tired by now. But once again I could marvel at the colors of the not-any-more-night sky. No clear memories from the last 20 kilometers. I somehow made it home and commenced working on the last sentence of my plan.