2011-08-06 47 7

Arches, Dave, Fredy, Kei, Nemeova, Rahel

This report starts around noon, at the hash that was located just in the city of Bern. (see Part I of our journey) After a most delicious meal in Bern, we all managed to get on the 14 o’clock train to Basel just in time.

During our travel to Basel Arches tried to fool the ticket inspector with a children’s "Ticki Park" toy ticket which he previously found in our train compartment. Despite us displaying our most childish behaviour, with Dave and Arches improvising a sword fight with bottles, the conductor spotted the ruse and demanded a real ticket, anyway. But even Nemeova had one at this point, so this wasn’t that much of an issue. It seems to have cheered up the conductor, though, as he laughingly remembered this on his second inspection round.

Once we arrived in Basel, we bough some provisions to support us on our further voyage. While some were buying coffee, Nemeova got some Luxemburgerli (delicious sweets). Kei and Nemeova did want to fetch a cup of tea, but this was thwarted by the only cashier taking a toilet break and closing the shop for a couple of minutes. As our car rental time was already running, we could not wait for him to return and headed to the parking lot, from where we continued our journey in cars from a car sharing service (the hash was located in a field right in the middle of nowhere in France, pretty much unreachable using public transit). They did not have any Citations, unfortunately, but we made do with what they had...

Thanks to Flurry’s prowess at reading maps ("I can do this without a stupid smartphone!!"), we completely and utterly failed at staying on the route we projected, but thanks to Dave being careful, downloading maps to his cell the evening before, and Arches’ great navigational skills, we eventually arrived at the hash. It was a couple of minutes after 16:00, but we decided to mark our presence in the already harvested corn field anyway, using straw that was lying around. But, alas, it was in the middle of nowhere, and nobody else was crazy enough to get to this hash, so we were the only ones there. That is why, in hindsight, we deem it an unfortunate choice to claim the hash in Bern before the Basel one... But of course there is not much we can do about that now, bar building a time machine and warning ourselves, creating a paradox and destroying the entire universe... Let’s not, okay?

On our way home, we took some detours to see the nuclear plant in Fessenheim, and also Blodelsheim, just because of its name ("blödeln" in German basically means fooling around, which would make this a village of people fooling around all the time :D).

After those detours, we noticed we were hard pressed on time if we wanted to return our cars in time. So, we went off to speed home via the German highways (the French ones ask for a toll). In the end, we managed to get back just five minutes late, but that did not prevent the grumpy guy waiting to get one of our cars to complain... We tried to calm him down a bit with the fact that we had to stop for gas, which at least made him shut up before driving off angrily.

Anyway, we all were hungry, so we went for dinner in Basel (and for some, a drink in the Bar Rouge - nothing naughty, we swear! - just a regular bar at the top of a large tower, providing you with a great sight on all of Basel) before each headed home again... :-)

All in all, it was a great day, even though we didn't meet any fellow geohashers.