2013-07-25 52 9

Location

In a marshy forest called "Hühnermoor" (translates to "chicken moor", link to WP:de), close to Kirchlinteln.

Participants

pah
Daniel
Frank
Gregor
Henning
PIt
Ralph

Expedition

During a staff retreat in Visselhövede, [User:Pah|pah] noticed that today's geohash for the graticule 52,9 was only 11km away from the current position, and even in roughly the "right" direction on our trip back to our workplace in Oldenburg (53,8). Being excited about this great opportunity to stop by the hash on our way home, pah "convinced" six colleagues – all of them first-time geohashers – to go for the trip.

On a bright and sunny day with more than 30°C/86°F, we had a first stop at roughly 1km distance to the hash. After some discussions with a lot of GPS receivers and navigational skills involved, we decided to get back into our cars and on our bikes to drive to another place, roughly 600m distance to the hash. From there, we had a walk through the forest, which started to become increasingly marshy. Another inconvenience was the immense amount of mosquitos and horse flies. They were quite happy about the extra lunch in terms of seven sweating geeks, stumbling through their gardens. After being within a radius of 50m, and while looking for a passage across a small river, we had to mourn one loss: Henning left the group and headed back to the car early, being beaten by the moor and the mosquitos:

"It's more than moor [pun intended], the mosquitos are killing me!"

The rest of us successfully crossed the marshy plains, until we finally reached the hash at around 3pm. There has been a wooden hide, fortunately without any hunters in sight. We used it to attach the mandatory note of our expedition, took some pictures and left rather quickly to head home (remember, the mosquitos! and even horse flies!) Let's see, who of the fist-time geohashers has been infected by the geohashing fever!