2009-11-07 49 11

Sat 7 Nov 2009 in Nürnberg, Germany: 49.1274876, 11.7789729 geohashing.info google osm bing/os kml crox

Just below a cliff in the Laber valley, northwest of Beratzhausen.

dawidi with Tomcat and Hans

I left home shortly before 10:00 and cycled up to Eilsbrunn, where I met with Tomcat and Hans; we got in the car and drove to Beratzhausen. For our first geocache for the day, we had to walk up a small wooded hill to the ruins of Ehrenfels castle. The castle turned out to be a really rather large building, with parts of three towers still remaining. Hans managed to "fall" into one of the towers, shouting up from its bottom - leaving us to wonder how he got down there since the entire diameter of the tower's inside was blocked by a metal grid. He had found a hidden spiral staircase within the thick tower wall! We explored the place some more and were back at the car around 12:00.

Two more caches led us to one small, and one pretty large cave, and then we had to do something about lunch. Since the few restaurants in the nearby villages seemed abandoned (not that unusual on a foggy November day where one wouldn't expect tourists), we drove back to Beratzhausen, which had similar gastronomical shortcomings. We asked some locals and they directed us to an inn a bit farther out, where we did finally get a good lunch.

At 15:30 we headed out again, and this time went straight for the hash coordinates. We parked the car next to the road a bit east of the hash, then walked along the edge of the forest. Fighting with really bad GPS reception between the trees below the cliff, and some rather stubborn shrubbery, we eventually did manage to see our GPSes drift across the 0m location and snapped pictures between the trees at what seemed the most likely exact location.

Then we found a way to the top of the cliff, which had much better GPS coverage (but was about 30m to the north-east of the hashpoint) and a nice view across the valley.

After returning to the car, we had a few more geocaches scheduled - one in the valley, and three in Lupburg - before heading home. We got back to Eilsbrunn around 18:00, already in the dark.

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  An impressive tower in the ruins of Ehrenfels...

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  ... where Hans somehow managed to get through to the bottom.

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  Walking to the hashpoint.

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  Coordinates reached... somewhere around here.

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  Ground at the hashpoint.

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  Successful hashers.

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  View from the hashpoint into the valley.

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  Fisheye view from the top of the cliff.

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  Hashers at the top.