Dan Q
In good news, my injured arm is not broken and should recover within a couple of weeks.
In amusing news, the doctor who treated me recognised me from (tales of) my electric shock admission earlier in the year, even though she never treated me on that ocassion.
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I was a small child the first time I got stuck in an elevator. I was always excited by lifts and the opportunity for button-pushing that they provided1, and so I’d run ahead of my mum to get into a lift, at which point the doors closed behind me. The call button on the outside didn’t work for some reason, and I wasn’t tall enough to reach the “open doors” button on the inside. As a result, I was trapped within the elevator until it was called from another floor.
Y’see: it turns out that in some lifts, the emergency brakes are sensitive enough that even a little bit of a bounce can cause them to engage. And once they’re locked-on, the lift won’t move – at all – until the brakes are manually released by an engineer.
As I discovered, way back in March 2004.
On behalf of Three Rings, I was speaking at the 2004 Nightline Association conference. While there, I’d bumped into my friend Fiona, who was also attending the conference3 The conference was taking place on the upper floor of the Manchester University Students Union building, and as the pair of us got into a lift down to the ground floor, I noticed something strange.
“Woah! This lift is really spongy, isn’t it?” I asked, noticing how much the cabin seemed to bounce and sag as we stepped into it.
“Yeah,” said Fiona, shifting her weight to give it an experimental jiggle.
The elevator started to descend, and as it did so we both gave it another gentle bump, mostly (in my case at least) with an experimental mindset: did it only wobble so much when it was stopped at a floor, or did it do it at all times?
It turns out it did so at all times. Except when it bounced between floors, as we were now, the emergency brakes detected this as a problem and locked on. The lift jerked to an immediate halt. We were stuck.
We shouted for help from people passing on a nearby floor, and they were able to summon assistance from the lift’s maintenance company. Unfortunately, we were told, because it was a weekend we’d likely have to wait around four hours before anybody could get to us, so we’d have to amuse ourselves in the meantime.
That’s when I made the first of two discoveries that I would make, this day, about Fiona. I learned… that she’s mildly claustrophobic. Not enough to stop her from going into a lift, but enough that when she knows she can’t get out of a lift, it’s likely to cause her a problem. I realised that I should try to find a way to distract her from our situation, so I suggested a game.
“How about I-Spy?” I asked, half-jokingly, knowing that this game could surely not occupy us for long within the confines of a small metal box.
“Sure,” she agreed, “You go first.”
“I spy with my little eye… something beginning with… N!” I said. If we were going to be stuck here playing I-Spy for several hours, I might as well pick something deviously tricky. Embedded into the corners of the floor were four recessed hexagonal nuts: my word was nut. That’d keep her occupied for a while.
I forget what she guessed and when, but she eventually guessed correctly. It probably took less than 5 minutes. Now it was her turn.
Fiona thought for a little while, looking around our tiny prison for inspiration. Eventually, she’d found something:
“I spy with my little eye,” she said. Then, after a pause: “Something beginning with… S.”
“Screw?” I asked, assuming immediately that she’d have chosen something as devious as I’d thought mine was, and noticing that the button panel was secured with a quartet of recessed flat-head screws. Nope, Fiona indicated.
“Shoes? Oh! Soles?” I suggested, pointing to the bottoms of my shoes, which were visible as I sat on the floor of the lift. Nope.
“Shirt? Socks?” I glanced at myself. I wasn’t sure there was much inside the lift that wasn’t me or Fiona, so it seemed likely that the thing I was looking for was on, or part of, one of us.
“Step?” I gambled, indicating the metal strip that ran underneath the closed doors. No luck.
“Umm… shaft? Can you see part of the lift shaft somehow?” A smirk and an eye roll. I was getting further from the right answer.
“Ssss….sliding doors?” “Slit?” “Slot?” Still nothing.
This continued for… three… hours4. Fiona sat, self-satisfied, smugly enjoying my increasing frustration right up until the point at which the lift engineer arrived and began levering open the doors on one of the two floors we were between to allow us to wriggle our way out. I must’ve inspected every square centimetre of that tiny space, of myself, and of my gaming companion. Clearly I was alongside the world grandmaster of I-Spy and hadn’t even known it.
“Okay, I give up,” I said, at last. “What the hell was it?”
Soon, I would make the second of the two discoveries I would make about Fiona that day. That she’s quite profoundly dyslexic.
“Circle,” she said, pointing at the lit ring around the alarm button, which we’d pressed some hours before.
I’d like to think that when Fiona got stuck in a lift a second time that same Spring, it was karma.
1 My obsession with button-pushing as a child also meant that it was hard to snap a photo of me, because I always wanted to be the one to press the shutter button. I’ve written about this previously, if you’d like to see examples of a photos I took as a toddler.
2 The photo is, specifically, Platform 3 of Liskeard Station, which is distinctly separate from the other two platforms, requiring that you leave the main station and cross the road. This is a quirky consequence of the way this section of the Liskeard to Looe branch line was constructed, which necessitated entering Liskeard at right angles to the rest of the station.
3 If I remember rightly, I first met Fiona on a bulletin board when she volunteered to help test Three Rings. She later visited Aberystwyth where she and Kit – who was also helping with the project back in those days – fell in love. It was very sweet.
4 I’d love to say that the three hours flew by, but they didn’t. But it was still infinitely preferable to being stuck in there alone. And, in fact, there are plenty of people for whom I’d have rather been stuck alone than stuck with.
I’m leaving Ireland a day late, from the wrong airport, and with one fewer functioning arm than I anticipated. It’s been quite the ride. I’ll be glad to get home.
(for those that are concerned: I’ve damaged my shoulder, possibly while slipping down a hill in search of a geocache or geohashpoint; so, y’know, the usual reason I get injured… but I’ve got some physio instructions I’m supposed to follow, and I’ll be okay)
Sooo… I’m in Dublin.
I missed me flight at Knock airport, which turns out to have been the only plane leaving that tiny airport today. So I arranged a flight from Dublin tomorrow, extended my car rental and arranged to drop it off in the capital’s airport instead, and zipped over here.
Now I’m in an underlit bar sipping a Guinness and waiting for a pizza.
This checkin to GC8XWKX Shamrock #20 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
My mum and I have been visiting Ireland on a geohashing & geocaching expedition. We’d spotted this shamrock shape but it wasn’t in our operating zone so we didn’t get a chance to hunt any of them, until today’s journey up to Knock airport saw us take a comfort break nearby, and we figured we’d come find this cache, at least.
Found this well-maintained cache with no difficulty at all: I thoroughly approve of a cache that is hidden just barely enough to not be muggled, but not so much as to inconvenience a geocacher who’s sometimes in a hurry! Nice work, FP awarded. TFTC.
This checkin to GC8E8A0 Challenge 💖 Virtual x 15 💖 Country x 5 💖 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
I’ve never much gone for ‘challenge caches’. Mostly they just bug me when I fail to filter them off my map and only end up realising that I’m arbitrarily disallowed from logging them when I’m already out and about.
So imagine my surprise when, stopping in town this misty morning on my way to Knock airport after a week of geohashing/geocaching along the West coast with my mother, I discovered by chance that I’m actually eligible for it. I’ve cached plenty enough to meet the virtuals count but I couldn’t for the life of me name the six countries I’ve apparently found virtuals in. Apparently I have, though, according to the checker, so I parked nearby and walked out here to find the cache.
It didn’t take long before I spotted something suspicious and pulled it, and lo and behold, it was the cache. The lid is absent and the logbook missing, so I tore a bit off a bus ticket from my wallet and wrote the usual bits on that before returning the cache to its hiding spot.
I’m still not a big fan of challenge caches, but I enjoyed this cache for what it is nonetheless. Might need a new logbook and possibly a lid, though!
TFTC.
This checkin to geohash 2024-11-27 53 -8 reflects a geohashing expedition. See more of Dan's hash logs.
Driveway outside a house in Garrafrauns, Co. Galway, Ireland.
A quick and easy find on our way to the airport at Knock to end our Irish adventure, this morning.
Finding the hashpoint was easy. We drove to it, arriving at 10:31, overshooting very slightly and walking back 20 metres (we could’ve done it without even getting out of the car if we’d cared to). Then we were done.
What happened next is where things went wrong. We stopped in Ballyhaunis, half-way between the hashpoint and the airport at Knock, for a comfort break and to find a local geocache. Then we hiked out to find a second nearby geocache, but the icy conditions on the way back slowed us down considerably (and my mother fell over at least once). We stepped into a cafe for a quick drink, and apparently my attitude to our imminently-departing flight was so laid-back (in actual fact, I thought we had about half an hour more in-hand than we did) that my mother decided to reflect it and play laid-back too. Sarcastically, she suggested we stay around Ballyhaunis for a round of cakes, too, and I – not recognising her tone as sarcastic – agreed. In fact, I thought that her relaxed attitude was because we had a long time until our flight, too. (tl;dr: when two people famed for their sarcasm communicate sarcastically with one another, they should be careful not to, y’know, completely fuck up their plans for the rest of the day by accident)
As we digested our scones and my mother prepared to pour a second mug of tea, I pulled out my phone and realised to my horror that our plane was scheduled to depart in a little over 40 minutes: I’d got the departure time wrong. She said, “I thought you knew it was close, but you knew something I didn’t, like that it was really late!?” Nope.
We ran as fast as the icy ground would permit us to back to the car and drove at great speed to the airport, just in time to miss the closure of the departure desk. We’d just missed the last and indeed only flight out of Knock airport that day. Fuck.
Anyway, all of which is to say that we extended the rental on our car, arranged to drop it off at Dublin airport, and drove coast-to-coast across Ireland to get to a more-favourable airport and a last-minute AirBnB, where we dropped out bags then went out for pizza in a dangerously underlit bar before listening to some Irish folks music in a different bar and going to bed.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow… we’ll leave the country. I promise.
I’ve only been driving in Ireland for several days, so less than 100% of the iconography of the signage makes sense to me instantly, for now. But this one’s a complete mystery to me.
Is this warning joggers than tiny cars might bounce off their heads? Or is it exhorting distant swerving motorists to put on their right indicator to tell people which way to run to avoid being hit by them? Or maybe it’s advising that down this road is a football pitch for giants and they’ll play “headers” with you in your car if you’re not careful? I honestly haven’t a clue.
This checkin to GC9QNY4 NFCache reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Despite having been hidden as recently as 2022, this “feels” like an old-school cache. A non-trivial offset, a real scramble through the terrain to find it, and a generous-sized container at the other end. Back around 2010 many more caches felt like this, and in a way I miss them: being able to find a quick-and-easy traditional cache on every street corner is a quick win, but it takes some of the satisfaction out of the old days when you’d expect an extended journey and hunt.
That said, our expedition to this cache was perhaps quite a lot harder than it needed to be. There’s a few reasons for that. The first reason is that we didn’t start out until the sun was getting close to the horizon, which made searching for the first part hard and the second part – by which point we were using our phones as torches – extremely challenging. Another challenge came from that first part, which was not where it ought to be: we found it on the floor, rather than hanging as indicated, some metres away from the correct location, and having lost *both* of its NFC tags. Digging through the leaf litter eventually revealed one of the tags, and we’ve left it stacked with the board, but without being re-attached to its tree it’s going to get lost again the next time the weather turns bad. Worth a look!
The next challenge came from the encoding of the NFC tag. It’s possible to encode an NFC tag so that it says “this is text”, but the CO has encoded it to say “this is a URL”. As a result, my phone insisted in trying to open the coordinates as a URL (stripping all space characters from it as it did so), leaving me to reverse-engineer it back to coordinates. And then remembering how to convert my GPSr from DDM mode to Decimal so I could enter the coordinates in the right format. But I managed eventually. And wow: the CO wasn’t kidding when they said this was on the opposite side of town!
My mum and I rushed across to the new location. Thankfully our first guess as to the place where we’d be able to park our car was correct, and we pressed on into the woods in the fading light, tripping over branches and sploshing through streams as we tried to find out way by our phone torches alone. Getting close, we spiralled out, hunting for the cache. Eventually, not helped by the hint (there are so many candidates!), and fearing our expedition at an untimely end, we hit the old logs, and found that the photo in log GL1A022W8 by macadonis to be extremely helpful: even in the low light, we could see a hinted object and – after a little debate about which way we should be facing it – soon had the cache in hand. Hurrah!
We signed the (proper size) log book and returned it as we found it. Thanks for a wonderful adventure; FP awarded for the effort that’s gone in to making a cache that simultaneously felt both “modern” (with NFC tags) and “old school” (with the high effort-to-reward ratio, the challenging terrain, and the difficult hides). If stage 1 could be re-attached to its host and perhaps re-programmed to expose text, rather than URL, data, this cache could go from great to spectacular. TFTC!
This checkin to GC6TZ1G CachePoint reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
After a boat tour of the bay and a delightful late lunch, my mum and I came out here to find this cache as the last of three muggles present were packing up. TFTC!
This checkin to geohash 2024-11-26 53 -9 reflects a geohashing expedition. See more of Dan's hash logs.
Sea, 1.5km South of Clare Island, near Mweelaun Island.
This can’t be done. Right? Right?! Except maybe it can. I’ve found a few folks with boats and I’m going to phone-around in the morning and see about chartering one.
I left lots of voicemails and messages lots of people, but nobody could offer me a lift to this random spot on the edge of Ireland. We later took a tour boat out into the bay but it didn’t go near it either (but was a delightful ride, and we just-about came within sight of the hashpoint).
This checkin to GC1X432 Swan Lake reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Found by my mother and I while exploring the area. What a beautiful estate, thanks for bringing us here. Log slightly damp but usable. TFTC. Greetings from Oxfordshire and Lancashire, UK!
This checkin to GC9VD2M Claremorris_01 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Two of us hunted for about 10 minutes without any luck. We found a the host object without difficulty and soon found a man-made hook upon touch we suspect the cache might once have resided. Eventually we had to give up and move on. Nice location, but might need CO attention.
This checkin to GCA0R10 Leabharlann 📚 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
QEF for my mother and I as we passed through Claremorris. Excellent hiding place for the area and a great condition of cache, FP awarded. SL, TFTC.
This checkin to geohash 2024-11-25 53 -8 reflects a geohashing expedition. See more of Dan's hash logs.
Field East of Claremorris, Co. Mayo, Ireland
Today we need to drive North up the entire length of the M18 and M17 to get to our next accommodation. If we take only a minor diversion at Tuam we can see how accessible this hashpoint is, on the way!
On today’s leg of my mother and I’s expedition to go hashing around the West coast of Ireland (hampered only by the floods of Storm Bert) we were scheduled to drive a few hours up the country to move from our old accommodation of the last few nights to our new accommodation of the next two. On our way we accidentally drove the wrong way down the M6 for a spell (as you can see on our tracklog) as we intended to visit Athenry for some geocaching, before pushing on to the hashpoint.
We drove past the field with the hashpoint in order to dodge an incoming tractor and to scout out safe parking spaces. Finding a suitable verge, we pulled up and took a look at the pasture with the hashpoint. The gate into it was seriously churned up with mud, so I switched to my wellies and my mother pulled on a pair of waterproof trousers, and we waded out.
Once past the gate, it got a lot easier and we were able to quickly find our way to the hashpoint at 13:10.
It was the middle of a muddy field. Not exciting, but a good view of rolling countryside and wind farms.
We swiftly made our way back to our car to avoid any questions from passing farmers about what we might be doing hanging our near a piece of mystery agricultural equipment we were near.
Then, after changing back into our regular footwear so we didn’t bring tonnes of mud into our rental car, made our way down into Claremorris. There, we enjoyed a celebratory carvery lunch, toured a handful of local geocaches, explored a path that Google Maps (only) claims exists – possibly a trap street? – and walked around a lake with lots of scultpures until we discovered that the route we’d planned to take was underwater. At that point, we figured it was time to go check-in to our new AirBnB and returned to our car to set off.
A highly-successful trip.
(includes drive from old accommodation, geocaching, hiking, drive to new accommodation, etc)
Download full journey tracklog.
(from where we parked to the hashpoint and back)
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