Peter's Site

Last week it was again time for the annual TBI winter seminar in Bled, Slovenia. This year roughly 70 people from the research groups in L.E., Vienna, Freiburg and Copenhagen and other places attented the meeting. Thus we had a full week of talks, which were held in the hotel's conference room this time. As usual we had a broad range of topics, not only covering RNA stuff.

Since the talks were scheduled in afternoon and night sessions, we had plenty of time during the day to get around in perfectly sunny and warm Bled. On Thursday there was the bioinformatics afternoon in Ljubljana, with some talks of the local bioinformatics folks. During the day we visited Ljubljana's castle and after the talks we experienced Ljubljana at night.

Caching

On Saturday, Sylvia, Jana, Alex and me went on a presumably easy walk to find a geocache hidden at a nearby river. We first followed the street leaving Bled and then went more or less straight to the first waypoint following the GPS directions. After a small half-hour break in the sun, we were just 50m away from the place but suddenly realized, that we were standing on top of a - say 50 meter - high bluff, whereas the river was down in the valley.. Well, that's what I would call the worst case.. We than decided to give up and walk back to Bled, after having a small break on the top of that hill. After climbing down (some decided to slip down ), the GPS showed the location to be not that far away, so we were motivated again and crossed the river. Arriving at the coordinates and finding nothing there, Alex eventually entered the correct coordinates in the GPS, which were only some hundred meters away. So we went on and after climbing another hill (fuck hills!) we reached the first waypoint, which was a memorial stone. Using the engraved date we calculated the final coordinates, but they seemed to be not really reachable from our place in a passable time, so we again decided to give up and walk down the way back to the bridge. During the way downhill, the location became closer and closer as we passed on and suddenly we eventually reached the final coordinates. We found the ammo box quite quickly and we all were pretty excited about the happy end. There was even a HGTTG-GeoCoin in the box. When we arrived back in Bled, it was already dark and we estimated that we have been walking about 15km on that day. The trip was very adventurous and exhausting, but was totally worth all the ups and downs..