2010-10-19 48 8

I reached a geohash in Germany!

Tue 19 Oct 2010 in 48,8: 48.8608726, 8.8830147 geohashing.info google osm bing/os kml crox

Location

Between Mönsheim and Weissach in a copse of trees by what I'm guessing is one of those German multiuse paths that have bikes and joggers and also (if today is an accurate example) dogs, goats, tractors, smart cars, airplanes and mud.

Participants

• Robyn on an orange rental bike I shall hereby call Fahrvergnougat.

Plans

With the assistance of the extremely knowledgeable Ekorren, I formulated the following plan.

• Buy a Baden-Würtenberg-Ticket and then after 9:00 am take the train south to Niefern-Öschelbronn, and bike to the point.
• Bike north to Mühlacker, take the train to Maulbronn West, and visit the historic monastery at Maulbronn.
• Bike back to Maulbronn and get back on the train and go somewhere, taking advantage of the all-day ticket to jump off the train if an interesting journey became available.

Expedition

If you don't like long expedition reports, you can just read the section headings.

Robyn finds the bike path

I took a couple of tries to find the bike path to the local train station. It turns out that the official bike route goes through a corporate parking lot placarded with "beware of the forklift" signs. Mind you, I just assumed they were warning me about forklifts because they had pictures of forklifts and impressive-looking German words with Zs in them. Perhaps they were advertising forklift lessons. Anyway, once I went past the forklift signs, up a trail at the back of the lot and around a sharp corner, I was beside the train tracks, and quickly found the station. My next challenge was to buy a ticket to Niefern-Öschelbronn.

Robyn goes somewhere on the train

I could see a ticket vending machine on the island between the sets of train tracks, so I took the bike through an underpass and up the stairs to the centre platform to use it. I had been briefed not only on the train information in the Planning section above, but that ticket vending machines have a "translate" option. My German being almost entirely limited to the things the enemy yelled at one another in American movies about WWII, the translate option was going to be a very good idea. It was a touch screen. I pressed the Union Jack at the bottom of the screen, and the screen changed to a different one, with four large, coloured buttons, all labelled in German. I chose one of the ones that had the syllables "Ticket" on it, and was presented with a screen that looked like the form I have to fill in to pay my income tax, except in German. I did recognize a word down the bottom: Hilfe: Help.

Another customer came towards the machine and so I said "Hilfe, Bitte." I showed him the name of the ticket I had to buy and he pressed the right buttons for me. I put in the €20 note and the machine gave me a ticket with a shiny gold stripe. Yay! Now all I have to do is figure out which train to get on. My benefactor doesn't recognize the name of the station I am going to. I guess I probably have to change trains at Pforzheim to get there. I go back down the stairs and up the other side to the platform where there are schedules and more people. I look first at the schematic map of the train system and I can't find Niefern-Öschelbronn or Mühlacker anywhere. I find a fellow traveller who speaks English with a lovely English accent and he's not familiar with the towns, but indicates Eschelbronn on the transit map. Now in Canada if the place you wanted began with one letter and the train you were considering went to a place that began with another letter, it would be the wrong train. But this isn't my country; it's not my language. If ss can sometimes be ß, then maybe Ö is sometimes E. Ö is after all a form of OE. He tells me that I have to get on the next train north from here and then at Heidelberg transfer to the S5 train in the direction Eppingen, but disembark at Meckesheim to take the S51 one station to Eschelbronn. According to him, is that S51 may be a bus, but how far is one stop going to be? I can bike it. This train is going north, and I want to go south, but Heidelberg is a big centre and it makes sense that it might be quicker to go north and transfer to a train that is going where I want to go, rather than wait for one that is going to stop in the right places. I thank him and get on the train.

The train has a loudspeaker announcement and a display telling us what each next stop is. The German word for next is just like English, only about eight letters long and with an ümlaut. (I don't know if ümlaut is supposed to have an ümlaut, but it would be disappointing if it didn't, wouldn't it?) Eventually the next stop is Heidelberg, but it's Heidelberg something and Robyn is just barely smart enough to realize that Heidelberg will have lots of platforms and trains, so this is just another station on the outskirts. Robyn gets off at the real Heidelberg, which has lots of platforms and trains, and tries to interpret the departure schedule to determine what platform to get S5 at. She asks someone, who finds it and Robyn gets on that train.

... to be continued.