2013-10-19 49 8

Location

The hash lies directly at the fence at the southern edge of a former quarry in the village Nieder-Ramstadt, county Darmstadt-Dieburg.

Participants

Plans

GeorgDerReisende wants to try hitchhiking to this place from Kassel, but this time starting at Wilhelmshöhe. He will be there at 16:00 for the xkcd-meetup.

Danatar will make a detour on the way to his parents and also plans to be there at meetup time.

Expedition

GeorgDerReisende

Sorry, I failed again. I started at home at 10am, and went to the Wilhelmshöhe junction of the A44 and waited there for two hours, but nobody stopped. Then I wanted to try it at the Auestadion. On the way to there, I have seen a lot of cranes. At Auestadion I waited for another hour, but again nobody stopped. Then I gave up and went home.

junction Wilhelmhöhe at the A44
two hours later: grrrr
cranes
cranes

The result is: since the closing of the service station Kassel southbound there is no possibility at all to hitchhike to the south from Kassel. Maybe via Marburg. Everybody and I has to go from the Dresdener Straße north to the service station Göttingen and has to change there the direction, this detour will need two hours of travel time.

Danatar

I had planned to visit my parents and the hashpoint was more or less on the way. Lunch with a friend took a little longer than planned, so I started at 14:30 instead of 14:00. There was much traffic on the Autobahn, but luckily no traffic jams, just enough traffic that I couldn't go quite as fast as I wanted. After passing Aschaffenburg, I left the Autobahn and followed various federal roads. Those dragged on longer than I expected and 4 p.m. came nearer and nearer. After Groß-Zimmern I went along smaller streets and through towns, finally arriving at Nieder-Ramstadt at 16:10. Finding a convenient place to park the car and walking along a small track took another few minutes and I knew I was too late for meetup time.

I reached the area near the hashpoint and discovered a fence, with a "No trespassing, mortal danger!" sign. I already knew that the lake from the satellite image was in an abandoned quarry, but I didn't expect it to be fenced, and certainly not that the hashpoint would be inside the fence. I had expected there to be the lake with a track around it and without anything blocking my way. I walked along the fence in both directions, but the fence remained there. Behind the fence I could see the almost vertical slope going down into the quarry, so I really couldn't blame anyone for building that fence. Just before giving up, I took a look at my GPS receiver. Until then, I had navigated by a satellite image printout and without really thinking about it I had taken that one line on the map for the fence, when in reality it indicated the track running along the fence. But on the GPS unit I saw that I was already further north than the hashpoint by 0.00001 degrees, while only a few metres east of it. And apparently the satellite map's accuracy was not top notch here. Instead of being 10 m inside the quarry, the hashpoint turned out to be at the corner where the fence turned from running northwest-southeast to west-east. With a little patience and walking left and right I finally caught a moment when the GPS unit showed the exact coordinates while still being on my side of the fence. So I had reached the spot after all, hooray!

While taking pictures I heard loud squeaking from the other side of the fence, indicating wild boars. After holding still for a while and listening for the rustling of leaves, I saw a shadow walking past in the underbrush, but couldn't recognize anything. I carefully followed the squeaking along the fence, when suddenly I saw one wild boar squeeze itself through a hole in the fence and running across the track, disappearing in the bushes on my side of the fence. Unfortunately I wasn't fast enough to take a picture. I waited for a while, but nothing happened, so I walked back to my car and drove on.