2024-07-03 32 35

Wed 3 Jul 2024 in 32,35: 32.4591779, 35.0060062 geohashing.info google osm bing/os kml crox

Location

In a field outside Kibbutz Ein Shemer, possibly agricultural, possibly not.

Participants

Yerushalmi (talk) and #3-5

Plans

We'll take a train up to somewhere near the Kibbutz, then a bus to the Kibbutz. There is a "tractor museum" in the area, so I'll take the kids to that, then go to the point, then come back.

Expedition

Everything went wrong.

It began with leaving the house late for numerous reasons. Then, when we were switching trains, #3 found a wallet; in the effort to track down its owner, we missed our train and had to take the next one, half an hour later. This resulted in missing the direct buses to the Kibbutz that would have brought us there in sufficient time to see the museum while it was still open - so we had to take several other buses, culminating in one that dropped us off outside the Kibbutz, followed by a fifteen-minute walk in extreme heat.

Then we discovered that the tractor museum didn't exist.

Well, maybe. There *were* dozens of tractors and other farming implements arranged neatly outside a building, but it wasn't the same building that was labeled on Google as the tractor museum. And there was not only nobody in or around the building, all of the objects appeared to have been abandoned for years.

We sat down on a bench in a nearby park and ate lunch leisurely. I told the kids that after lunch I would tell them what little I know about the farming implements, then we would go to the geohash, then go home.

In the meantime, I checked when there would be buses from the Kibbutz... the next bus was in.... only eighteen minutes?! And the bus after that... tomorrow morning?!

Never mind! Quickly, wrap up everything, forget the geohash entirely, let's go look at the farming implements right now!

I told them what I knew, and what I could glean from what the farming implements looked like they did (this clearly digs a hole, drops seedlings, then covers the hole; that clearly cuts things into tiny pieces). Then we went to the bus stop, across the street, with six minutes to spare.

And waited. And waited. And waited.

Ten minutes after the bus's scheduled arrival, we concluded it clearly wasn't coming. Moovit usually gives live updates of where the bus is, but not when there's GPS jamming. Sigh. Guess we'll have to walk to the bus stop *outside* the Kibbutz, the one that we used on our way in. Moovit said we would make it to the bus stop in plenty of time for its scheduled arrival - but it still couldn't tell us exactly when it was arriving, due to the GPS jamming.

Halfway through the fifteen-minute walk, the we bus we had just given up on drove past us into the Kibbutz. There was general wailing and gnashing of teeth.

We resumed our walk. And we were halfway across the street to the bus stop when the bus that we wanted to catch *outside* the Kibbutz drove by. We missed it because of those thirty seconds of wailing and gnashing of teeth.

If you're keeping score: the bus that we were early for arrived just after we gave up on it, and then it arrived just in time to make us miss the bus that we would have been on time for.

So we had to wait another half an hour for the next bus to go along that highway. Instead of going straight home, I took the kids to my brother's house as compensation, where they played with their cousins and ate pizza.

What a miserable expedition.