2009-08-24 50 11

Mon 24 Aug 2009 in 50,11: 50.7525724, 11.2592734 geohashing.info google osm bing/os kml crox

Participants

• Reinhard

Expedition

A sunny, warm Monday made Reinhard want to go on a geohash expedition of about 80 km by bike in the evening. But, instead of leaving work early, there was a series of lectures he had to wanted to listen to. So, Reinhard came home after 19:00, hadn't even prepared the course, yet, and was hungry. Thus, it got 20:42, before he finally started his expedition, which had the advantage that he could wear transparent glasses instead of sunglasses right from the beginning and wouldn't have to stop for changing, when it got dark, since it already was quite dark.

Cycling to Eschdorf, which was near to the hashpoint, wasn't a big deal, apart from the fact, that Reinhard chose a road he hadn't rode on before and that turned out to be composed of 1 m long concrete slabs with huge spaces in-between. Reinhard knew that the hashpoint would be a good deal into the forest, so he studied his electronic topographic map, that contained all the small forest paths. He then started to follow them, but when it was still 500 m to the hashpoint, Reinhard had to push his bike, since the paths were too bad (probably would have been too bad even for mountainbiking and in daylight). The path was getting steeper and steeper and Reinhard was wondering, how someone could be that crazy to go to an arbitrary spot in a forest far from home at night, where he could do nothing but taking some stupid photos of that stupid endeavor. Well, somehow he managed to get closer to the hashpoint and had to leave the path, now mostly carrying his bike a steep slope down. Between some blueberry bushes and countless trees he reached the coordinates and took some photos together with Roosevelt, by whom he was accompanied.

Not feeling like walking all the way back until he could get back on the bike, Reinhard decided to continue climbing down that slope, which promised to end at a forest path after about 200 m (which sounds closer than it actually is). He thought, one has to be either very brave or in good condition or just dumb to walk/climb down there between all the dangerous roots and branches at night, even carrying a bike, where nobody was around to help in case of a serious injury. Knowing that he wasn't brave at all, Reinhard hoped that at least the second one would apply for him. (Note to Manu: Honestly, it wasn't that bad, but I'd like to exaggerate a bit for the other readers.) When it was less than 20 m to the path (according to the map) Reinhard was faced with an impenetrable wall of dense bushes and trees. Reinhard didn't feel like walking through the wood any longer (maybe even back uphill?) and thus pretended to be David Copperfield, closed his eyes and marvelously appeared on the broad forest path behind the wall after a couple of seconds. The rest was mainly enjoying paved roads (with the exception of an unforeseen part of 3 km gravel road) and getting closer to home, which he arrived at 00:40 after 87.5 km with 1180 m total ascent.

You may see the tracklog here. The detour via Haufeld was intentional, because of collecting new GPS material for quaeldich.de trip planner. Concrete slabs were from Milbitz bei Teichel to Heilsberg (so I avoided this part on the way back).

• Photo Gallery
• 

  Only real proof of surroundings that could be made visible at night.

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  Bad forest path.

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  At the hashpoint.

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  Proof of dramatically drifting coordinates and date.

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  Roosevelt.