2015-07-05 48 8

Sun 5 Jul 2015 in 48,8: 48.9733926, 8.9997449 geohashing.info google osm bing/os kml crox

Location

In the rivulet Metter near Horrheim.

Participants

DODO

Plans

Go there on my bull in the morning when the heat isn't that bad. Having a look on which side of the ditch the hash lies.

The I want to continue to Vaihingen an der Enz, doing a little sightseeing.

Expedition

This will become a long story, but to avoid heart damage from to much tension, I'll tell you a long story short. Did it and gained a new achievement.

And now the longer version. I started at home at a quarter to nine, and it was already 30 degrees. But the bull was going fast and so the airstream keeps me at a moderate temperature. I don't know if it was because of the heat, but my tablet didn't get any gps reception until I reached the bridge in Speyer, and I was about to turn around when it suddenly started to give advices (that's why the tracklog starts so late). After around an hour I reached Ubstadt and with this I reached the Kraichgau. The landscape Kraichgau is named after the ditch Kraichbach and I was to follow this ditch for a while. I met some unexpected animals, which looked very comfortable. Of course, they like the grass and are used to the heat. The landscape got more and more marvelous: some cooler forrest pathes, some flowery meadows, some nice little tows, nearly everyone with an own castle and some vineyards, that I didn't have to climb:-)

At around half past eleven I got close to the hashpoint. I was on its northwestern side, 60m away where I tethered the bull. I wanted to start the camera but the tablet didn't react on any user input anymore and to make any user input wasn't that easy as the tablet has become so hot in my frontbag that it was hard to hold. I guessed, that was the reason for his refusal to work and so I turned it of and put it in the shadow while I was going towards the hash with my mobile. I crossed the meadow and at its end I came to the ditch Metter, which lies 3 m below me, with two very steep banks on both sides. I still had 7 m to go, and I feared already that that might not be enough when I returned to my bull. I turned the tablet on again and fortunately it worked again. So I repeated the way, to take some more pictures (as I don't want the pictures of my mobile). I knew that there was a bridge 500 m further on and so I tried to reach the hash from the other side. But again the garmin stopped at a 7, when I reached the ditch.

So what to do now? Hoping that gps reception is bad? Well, it was not. Fixing garmin to a long stick and reach out over the ditch? That might have been a funny idea, but how to proof the success? Giving up? That might have been the most intelligent idea, but hey, geohashing is about stupid ideas. And so I took the most obvious idea: climbing down the bank.Climbing down the 2 or 3 m was an adventure on its own and it took me almost 10 minutes but when I put my feet in the cold flowing water all the struggle was forgotten. And all the effort was rewarded with a zero. Yai. Happy geohasher. Of course, all the refreshment was lost, when I had climbed the bank again, but it was definitely worth it.

The last 6 kilometers to Vaihingen were very easy after the success and soon I reached the station. I decided not to take the next train but going the remaining 2 kilometers to the town, as I have never been there before. Vaihingen has a nice mediaeval city center, but there are several mediaeval cities in Germany, and so it was not to interesting. But of course there were several pubs and as I was quite dehydrated and hungry, I couldn't resist some typical swabian food (a nice thing in germany is, that you can easily reach another "tribe" in a day on bike).I decided for some cooked meet in broth with horseradish and I did right as it was delicious. Several drinks later I returned to the station as I had seen a sign over there to a KZ-memorial which I wanted to visit also.

I soon reached the two modern wooden buildings and as one of them was open I entered it. A man sat there and told me the story of the KZ. Two more people came inside, and the man started a short film about the history of the place. It was founded in 1944 as a labor camp, because the Nazis wanted to build a subterranean airplane plant in a nearby quarry. The confidentiality obviously didn't work to good as some month later air force and royal force started to bomb the plant almost permanently. Although the bombing was dangerous for their lives, it gave hope to the hungry and suppressed prisoners, and after a while they really got deported as the work couldn't be continued. So in 1945 the camp was changed into a so called recreational camp, a camp where ill prisoners where brought to die there. You may imagine what happened there when you read, that the french troops fond the place only by its sickening smell.

I had to leave in a hurry, as my train leaves at 14:50, and the next acceptable one was going 2 hours later. I didn't even had the opportunity to buy some more drinks, and so I was thirsty for the 90 minutes ride home.