2010-12-29 48 9

Wed 29 Dec 2010 in 48,9: 48.4977575, 9.2038733 geohashing.info google osm bing/os kml crox

Location

Reutlingen, close to the center and very close to the railway station.

The hash is in a garden or small park, which belongs to the building the Reutlinger Tafel food bank is in. A public footpath passes only a few metres from the hash.

Participants

Ekorren went there. Twice.

Expedition

This was supposed to be fast and easy, just a short stopover along the way to Stuttgart where I was about to go anyway.

If there isn't a fixed time when you have to be at a fixed place, you'll always leave home rather late, won't you? So did I, and programming the GPS prior to departure would have meant to miss another train. However, I can request coordinates from my mobile phone, so I don't really care about noting them at home - I can do that on the train. Stuff you can still do on the train never counts as urgent.

Problem was just: I also had left the phone at home. Well, you can live a day without mobile phone (remember? We did that each day only a few years ago, didn't we?), so this was definitely not worth going back and losing about an hour. I'd just try to visit the place as I remembered it from the online maps. Maybe I'll get close enough, maybe not, but I'll at least see the location.

Train arrived, with only one car. Somehow all passengers managed to squeeze themselves in, anyway. I already got off at the small station Reutlingen West. I wasn't sure whether that would be actually closer than the central station, but it wouldn't make much of a difference. Found my way through backyards and easily found the footpath to the hash garden. It was a public footpath as expected, so it was no problem to get in there. More of a problem was to estimate the exact location of the hash, as I only remembered it was supposed to be somewhere in the middle. So I fought my way through the snow to the middle, and documented that place. Will see later how close I really got.

Then I walked back to the central station and found I was just in time to catch the fast train to Stuttgart.

There were several things I wanted to do, buy, or research at Stuttgart, but the main reason why I went this day was that I wanted to visit an exhibition about political design. While I did my tour through the exhibition, I found there were two terminals in the exhibition - which were put there to give the visitors a possibility to visit the homepages of some of the art groups represented. Hm. Homepages? Well... you could try to enter another address, couldn't you? New tab... tjum.anthill.de/geohash.html ... indeed, it's loaded. So these terminals are indeed connected to the internet without restrictions. Quickly wrote down the coordinates on the backside of a flyer, and continued my tour.

It wasn't before on the train back home in the evening that I finally entered the coordinates into my GPS and compared them to the tracklog. This looked questionable, but I decided I had been close but not close enough. Reason enough for another stopover.

This time there was no hurry - I had 40 minutes of time between trains, and I knew where to go. Went there, found the exact place, and, to kill time, started to add a snowman to the location. And some kind of marker. Oh, and since just a standard snowman is boring, I gave him a snowsnail as pet for no particular reason.

Photos

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  Arriving

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  Planners thought a zig-zagging footpath would be more interesting, however, the driver of the snowplough preferred going straight through the meadow...

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  Reutlingen was well prepared for the hash. They even put up a sign to direct walkers to the hash house.

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  Somewhere in there

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  Strictly speaking this sign tells that the opposing traffic should go at pedestrians speed. How's it supposed to know, though?

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  The hash house

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  ... and what's in there

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  This hydrant turned out to mark the centre of the garden but not the hash.

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  Not the hash, but close

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  View from hash hydrant

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  Stuttgart resistance camp...

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  ... with nativity scene

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  Second hash visit

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  Marker