2012-08-27 46 11

Location

In what seems to be a parking lot in Egna, Sudtirol, Italy.

Participants

Plans

This could be my first consecutive geohash! Egna is outside the province of Trento so this will be my first expedition "away from home". It is also a half-italian/half-german speaking area, so it is going to be quite a challenge, since my German abilities don't go much further than the "Ich heiße Marco, wie geht's?". As always I will rely on public transport, taking an intercity bus to Egna and then walking southbound till the hashpoint.

Expedition

Everyone has to deal with failure sometimes, and it really seemed as the gods of geohashing didn't really want me to reach my goal today.

In the morning, I packed up my geohashing bag with camera, GPS, wallet, bus pass, and a piece of paper where I wrote down the road to the hash. Since I had to travel longer than the other times, I thought I'd better bring a magazine, which didn't fit in my bag. So I decided to switch to a backpack, moved everything there from the bag and left home.

Of course, I forgot the sheet with the coordinates and the directions home. And I didn't realize it until I found myself in Egna. Bus timetables wouldn't allow me to go back home and come back, so I had to rely on my GPS. I turned it on. The reception was horrible, and I hadn't saved the hashpoint on it. I needed an internet point. I started searching with my cellphone, but all the connections seemed to be password-secured. No public wi-fi, no libraries, no dumb people naming their network after their cat and leaving it open for random people to leech.

I tried my last chance- I called home, hoping that my sister had come back. She was home, and I asked her to check for my paper and send me a SMS with the coordinates as soon as possible. She did, and almost in sync the GPS started working again.

I proceeded to explore the area the hash was in. Lots of houses with a garden, but some bigger ones had a parking lot in front of them I was able to access without having to trespass anything. According to Google Maps, the hash was in front of one of those. Unluckily the coordinates my sister gave me fell right in the middle of a garden. The delusion was harsh- on the net it seemed to be perfectly accessible, but no trespassing signs and some unfriendly dogs seemed to say otherwise.

I walked back to the bus stop, took the bus home. When I arrived, I discovered that my sister had given me the wrong coordinates (.721 instead of .271) and that the hash would have been where I expected it to- in one of those parking lots. But it was too late to come back to Egna. Oh well... better luck next time!

Photos

The bus leaving, just got in Egna and still haven't realized I don't have my paper...
Double language signs! It's Italy, but people mostly speak German here.
The town centre, definitely a cute place.
Medieval arcades in the town centre.
The house where I believed the hash to be.