2012-06-04 53 4

Location

Grass field in Den Burg, Texel

Participants

Murfie

Plans

Doing a midnight expedition at the 2012-06-03/2012-06-04 day change.

Expedition

When I was examining the geohash coordinates for this weekend, a pleasant surprise popped up. It seemed that the geohash for Monday at 53,4 was located at a very good to reach spot on land ground. I would estimate this a less than 1% chance, since for the rest this graticule consists of about 95% water/sea and 4% sheep.

So after my successful geohash in Alphen aan den Rijn, I decided to go for a (short) weekend trip to Texel. My plan was to arrive in the evening, find some place to sleep, hunt for the hash in the midnight from Sunday on Monday and return for work early in the morning on Monday.

On Sunday afternoon I drove to Den Helder. There I took a ferry to Texel. (35 euro, ugh). Normally this ferry goes once per hour (at xx:30). However during summer season, they can decide to double the schedule to twice an hour. Luckily they did that this day. As I arrived at the ferry around 16:55, I had to wait only a few minutes to enjoy the 20 minutes trip.

Travelling with me on the ferry were about 100 other people and the same amount of seagulls.

When I arrived in Den Burg, I found a nice apartment called 'Bos en duin' ('forest and dune'). The complex was about a 10 minutes walk from the spot I had to reach at midnight.

To kill the time until midnight, I went out sightseeing and took quite some time to take typical pictures of the island (sheep, grass, sheep, sheep). Also I investigated the spot where the geohash for Monday was located and it was opposite of a small farm (without sheep, how is that possible?). Only one wire had to be stepped over to get to the holy ground of the geohash (this wire was there to stop 3 cows from reaching the nearby road). Since it was still Sunday, I didn't do this yet, because it might have looked silly (or suspicious?) if somebody passing by saw me entering this field.

Then I got some chinese take-away at a restaurant called 'Azie' ('Asia'). Watched some tv in the apartment. Took a bath. And pulled out my laptop to use the free Wi-Fi.

At 23:45 I walked through the dark to the grass field. At 23:58 I arrived at the field. The cows were still awake. They greeted me. I climbed over the wire and got to the geohash. Since the only light source I had was my mobile phone, I couldn't see where I was walking and hit some old cow shit. At exactly 0:00 I took a picture of me standing at the geohash. Luckily, the flashlight didn't scare the cows. A few moments after that, I noticed somebody else also took a picture because I saw another flashlight in the distance. But when I looked in that direction I saw it.. Duh, it was a large light tower which was about 1km away in the dunes.

Then with a satisfied grin, I walked back to the apartment, setting the alarm clock to catch one of the first ferries back to Den Helder in the morning.