2009-03-28 48 11

Sat 28 Mar 2009 in 48,11: 48.2044679, 11.5471750 geohashing.info google osm bing/os kml crox

In an inaccessible parking lot (well, more like a private dump for rusty buses and other large vehicles) between Feldmoching and Hasenbergl, in the north of Munich. Zb and dawidi had planned to meet there around 16:45.

Zb's expedition

(I assume you were there too, would like to read about it... hope you're not upset by my failure to show up :( )

Yup, I went and found the spot. Enjoyed it despite the cold rain. The hand-drawn map was mine. Detailed report and pictures to follow tonight or early next week. And no, I'm not mad for not meeting anyone else; sorry I left around 5:30p. By the way, is there a definition somewhere how close you have to get to a spot to count it as a success? I think the place where I left the hand-drawn map was close enough to consider it a success, wasn't it? Is there a wiki page about how close you have to be?

dawidi's expedition

Argh... a failure on so many levels, but at least nobody was hurt...

I had planned to bring my paraplane to the meetup so I could take aerial pictures of the coordinates and do a Proxy Geohash at least, in case we couldn't get into the parking lot. However, it looked windy at noon, so I decided I would take my quadrocopter instead. I had to do some maintenance on it first, but that went rather quickly. However... as always, I failed to actually get going at a reasonably early time, so I had just a little over half an hour to buy something to eat (I hadn't had lunch yet), buy tickets, and get to the correct platform before the train left. That all worked out, but as I was a mere couple of seconds too late, the doors were already locked, and the train left without me.

I would have given up and gone home at that point if I hadn't already bought the tickets. So I wandered around the station for a while until I found a bank indoors where I could park my bike and eat the food I had bought. (If I had not bought the food, I would have made it to the station in time, but my stomach insisted on getting lunch.) The next connection to Munich an hour later was, however, not a regular "RegionalExpress" but an "ALEX" - which means it doesn't have the modern, spacious double-decker waggons (with wide doors and large bicycle spaces) that are a joy to travel by bike in, but rather poorly refurbished, repainted, narrow, rickety 1970s waggons which are absolutely horrible to have to use with a bike.

Both bike spaces (there's space for *two* bikes per train!) were taken already, so I put mine in some other corner and since there was no space left for me and my bags, I had to sit in a compartment at the other end of the waggon. Because of the awkward geometry of the waggon, I underestimated the angle to lean my bike against the wall, and it promptly fell over in the first curve. I guess I'm lucky... nobody got hurt and I haven't found any damage on my bike either. For the rest of the ride, I stood next to the bike to watch it, even though my bags were still in the compartment.

In Freising, I got out of the ugly train to wait for the next S-Bahn to take me the last 25km to Feldmoching. It was already past 17:00 and it had started to rain - so I knew there would be no flying for me today. After getting off the S-Bahn, cycling to the hash was not a big deal anymore (it turned out to be on a one-way road leading in the wrong direction, but I didn't care).

Of course, by now, it was around 17:50, and Zb had left already. I found a damp mail envelope with a hand-drawn map of the surrounding roads, stuck to a tree, which I assume he had put there as a marker. I didn't get closer than about 20m to the hash, because the parking lot/dump turned out to be fenced - this fence was quite visible on the older Google's satellite images, but not at all discernable on Microsoft's (newer) aerial images. I wandered around it and photographed the property in all its hideous glory of rusting buses, stacked containers and miscellaneous garbage from all sides.

Not too long afterwards, I was on my way to Munich's central station. I found one geocache along the way. At least I arrived at the train in time, and this time it was a nice shiny RegionalExpress (even almost entirely without soccer fans and drunk people!), so the ride back home was more relaxed... and I got a couple of good laughs from an episode of my favorite podcast which I listened to on the ride.

All in all, it was a failure as a meetup (which was my fault), a failure as a geohash (inaccessible location), and a failure as an expedition (ugly weather, nothing particularly interesting discovered, stressful journey)... but... well... it did keep me busy ;-)

photos coming after the next ad break... er, i mean, sleep.