TravellingStrom

Mayan Prophecy Countdown

On the move again today, so after brekky I farewelled Ingo and Cecilia, thanks for the B&B(bed and booze) m8, hope to catch you one day down under at the Ozzie chapter of Cosmotos 🙂 There was a thunderstorm happening in the direction I wanted to go, which was north, but it was moving very fast, and although I had a few drizzles, I missed the main dump 🙂 I was heading to Bob’s today, only 80km or so and as I was riding along I spotted a cache on my GPS right next to the road, so after a little detour I was riding up this paved fire trail, I have a sneaky suspicion that a sign with a red circle and inside it cars and motorbikes means we are allowed to travel up that way, maybe?

After all the talk about Geocaching I have been doing, I thought for those interested to pass on some info about it. This is direct from the website I use which has collected the info on over 1.5 million caches

But basically, go to Geocaching.com and click on the drop down button marked LEARN, then select geocaching 101 and work from there, you never know, you may become interested.

Anyway, so I had stopped along this paved fire trail and started searching the woods and found a very nice idea to hide a cache, I will not tell you which one, but if you ever get there, you may recognise it Ingo 🙂

And this particular cache was not the one I had seen from up on the road, that was about 500m away up this same road, so after a few minutes, waiting for the doggy muggles to go, I was once again searching the woods and was lucky once more, cool, maybe Ingo should have come with me today instead of yesterdays bummer effort!

So, that was real good, two within 20 minutes 🙂 Then as I continued north I spotted another right next to the road and found that one too 🙂 I had previously downloaded what is called a Pocket Query,(only available to premium members, those that pay $30 a year) this is a bulk download of 1000 cache locations and I had specified a 150km radius around Ingo’s house, so they were everywhere 🙂

You gotta watch out for those stinging nettles though, they got me on my fingers, lucky for me I remembered about dock leaves which helped a bit to get rid of the sting 😉 Not long after this I ran out of caches near the roads I was on, because of the route I had selected, so I concentrated on moving and if any happened to pop up, I would go for them 🙂 This photo is for my mum, the town of Willich I can vaguely remember when I was a whippersnapper visiting my grandma and Aunti Barbara, and have a small memory of a set of cupboards full of plates and stuff come crashing down off the wall, as my sister and I cajoled Barb into getting up for the chocolate on top, ooops 😳

It was not too long after this that I arrived in Duisburg and found the correct place first go 🙂 The last time I had met Bob and Sabine was back in 86 when I backpacked though here, they had no kids then, but the two they now have are both quite grown up. Alex was here and studying at Uni, Hannah was in England working and I would meet up with her when I get to Bury.

So, after some lunch and a chat, they took me for a river tour. Now, Duisburg is an industrial city on the conjunction of the Ruhr and Rhine rivers and has the largest inland harbour system in Europe and they live right over one of many canal systems that have been made along this river system. So, over the next few hours we tasted the local beer and cruised the river in mostly sunshine, what a great afternoon 🙂 From these docks cargo is shipped everywhere up and down the river system and some of the barges are huge. Bob showed me this large pusher type boat, it would normally be used to push a number of barges but was owned by a company that ONLY used it for visiting dignitaries and meetings etc, a very expensive place, but there you go, it is the white and blue one in the following pictures, the other is a steam boat paddle wheel which is now a museum.

Then our tour boat arrived and we were off.

A lot of these river boats are also the owners homes, so they have a large house at the rear and as you can see, their cars are strapped to the roof with a donkey style winch to take it onto dry land, I could live like that I reckon, but motorbike on roof though 🙂

There was a lot happening around the docks, all sorts of stuff moving in and out, coal, wood, steel with a large truck network to connect it all together, although it seems it is not as active as it used to be in the past.

In this next photo they are working on the stern area of the barge and have dragged it arse backward up a sloping dry dock, very clever 🙂

The afternoon continued while we chatted and caught up on a lifetime and it was a very relaxing way to spend the afternoon 🙂

In that last photo above of Bob and Sabine, behind them is where they live and barges of all sorts cruise past here all the time, it is very interesting to watch, a constant change of scenery 🙂 This next one is weird, it shows some canoes up on the bank, but apparently they are made of concrete and are called art 😉

After that it was time to relax with some beers, a feed and watch some soccer on the teev, the European championships are nearly at the quarter finals stage and there are flags everywhere showing who they support. It was a very nice ending to the day and tomorrow would be more of the same, nothing physically planned, but visa stuff etc.

Cheers from Duisburg, Germany
TravellingStrom