Bruce’s Report #9
This report comes to you from Germany, somewhere on the AutoBahn between Frankfurt and Nurenberg. I’m in that slightly numb state after too many hours of travelling, and your body clock is confused by the bright morning sunlight when it’s meant to be night. The evening of the 2m FRG ARDF event many of the group gathered at Rik’s place for drinks and pizza. Perry and Anne gave us a lift there. A warm pleasent evening was spent discussing things ARDF or whatever. We were awarded our 1st and 2nd place medals ahead of time as we were due to fly out the next day. Thanks to the FRG organisers for a great time. A friendy bunch of people who I hope we’ll catch up with in the future.
It turned out to be a late night as we waited for the IRLP node at the Geelong end to be turned on, but it seems is was not to be. Oh well. ICQ still worked though. Thanks to Glenn for the marathon effort and now the pictures on the website http://streeto.cable.nu/bruce now go all the way up to report 8 ! Not sure if we’ll have the chance to load up more images from now on… see how we go for internet connections [we did…but they didn’t make it to the website till now unfortunately] !
We flew from Victoria to Toronto (this slightly odd route was what Carol was able to book for us in order to get to Germany in time for the German ARDF championships). Toronto was experiencing the hottest day this year, and was sweltering under about 42 Degrees and very humid. Felt like getting out of an airplane in Singapore. Onto Frankfurt, with a total time shift of +9 hours (uggh). We were met outside the McDonalds at Frankfurt airport by Stefan, a young competitor in the German champs who also went to China last year.
We’re now whipping along the autobahn amongst the holiday traffic (it’s a long weekend here) in a van with 6 of us plus one baby ————–>
As an aside, Stefan was telling us about the Czech 5 days ARDF championships earlier this year. There are 5 full days of ARDF: 2 days (2m/80m) of a mix of ARDF and orienteering where you have to find normal controls as well as radio controls (encourages good map work !). We’ll have to try this at a Metro I think as an interesting varient. 2 days (2m/80m) of normal ARDF which is also part of the Czech qualification rounds, and a final day of foxoring (see DARC website for full details), where competitors orienteer to a 200m circle on the map. Once within this circle they are assured they can hear a very low powered transmitter which is the control point (not necessarily IN the circle). Tricky huh ?
Anyway, that’s enough for today (whatever “today” means… I’ve lost track).
Cheers,
Bruce