Tag: GeoGuessr

This is part of the GEOGUESSR 1 series of posts.

We had a little issue walking from JD Wetherspoons back to the railway station at Colchester Town. To avoid a long-winded story, the problem is that we (well, I especially) forgot how little time we had to get back. My short-cut didn’t have entirely the result that I wanted, so Nathan suggested that we had to run to get the train. I was dead thrilled at this and did a little jog thing. I think Nathan thought that I was as good as running at Clive, who he thinks is very slow indeed.

We got to the train just as it pulling up into the railway station, so lots of relief. We then realised that it didn’t leave for five more minutes as the driver has to change end. We needn’t have rushed….. But, nonetheless, physically exhausted, the journey continued to Great Bentley….

This is part of the GEOGUESSR 1 series of posts.

We’ve arrived safely into Diss, and haven’t had to endure a conductor humorously announcing that “Dis is Diss” which was only partly amusing the first time I heard it….

So, we went to sit in the waiting room. Since we were waiting for the train, so we thought that this was a good plan. The waiting room at Diss also has the female toilets in it (in a separate room, not actually in the centre of the waiting room).

Then some bloody interfering old woman thinks she needs to inform us that this is a waiting room with the female toilets. Which I confirm. She then seems to suggest that the entire waiting room is therefore only accessible to women. Much as this segregation was all the rage in the nineteenth century, I’m pleased to confirm that Greater Anglia haven’t installed separate facilities for men and women.

I tried to glare at her angrily, but Nathan was angrier as she had already barged him out of the way getting into the female waiting room. She left looking like she wanted to find something else to be grumpy about. I’m sure that she was successful.

Anyway, onto Ipswich now….

This is part of the GEOGUESSR 1 series of posts.

This is still definitely a marvellous plan, which is going to a random place as determined by GeoGuessr. This was a plan devised in the pub, more of which here.

Well, the day has started perfectly and we’ve successfully boarded the bus in Norwich, to get to the metropolis of Diss as there is a bus replacement service in operation. Being very raucous, we sat at the back (there was no Mark Donovan to remove us, so we were safe), before realising that meant we’d be last off at the other end. This meant that we were cutting back on our time in Diss, but we decided we’d get over that trauma.

So, onwards to Diss!

This is part of the GEOGUESSR 1 series of posts.

For anyone who is absolutely inspired by our trip to St. Osyth (or, more likely, has stumbled across these pages via Google), here are some books which tell more of the story of the town’s history.

The History of St. Osyth – Pubs and Publicans

The St. Osyth Witch Story

St. Osyth’s Priory

The Essex Priory Way Walk

The Spirits of the Cage – A True Account of Living in a Haunted Medieval Prison

The Interwar Years – The Story of St. Osyth in the 1920s and 1930s

For anyone who wants to see the exact spot (and I’m not holding out much hope that this will be more than around two people), this is the GeoGuessr result screen…… It’s the image with the little black and white flag logo on.

I won’t go on about history for too long (well, not yet), but this is our first location, St. Osyth, from over 150 years ago. The exact location that we were given by GeoGuessr is on the right hand side of the above map, in what was then a much less built up area. A bypass has since been built across the northern edge of the town and a residential area has developed near to our random location.

OK, so we have our first location.

The web-site allowed us to explore the location area, using Google Streetview in the usual way. We used numerous clues to try and work out where we were in the country, trying to read from bus stops and signs, but they didn’t help initially. We were able to follow a bus on Google, although that only told us that it was a First bus, which didn’t help.

We then saw a logo, which Nathan thought was Wales and I thought was Cambridgeshire. But then a bus-stop gave us a clue after some more exploring and we knew that we were in Essex. Hardly great sleuthing, but this is new to us. At first this was disappointing, as I thought that Essex wasn’t entirely glamorous. But that’s entirely unfair, just because it’s sort of close to Norfolk.

There was another clue in that we saw a sign with the town name on, which I accept is a bloody big clue. And it was St. Osyth, which I had never heard of. I went off to explore Google Maps and discovered it was potentially in Jaywick, which I think is still the poorest area of the UK. I wasn’t entirely sure that this GeoGuessr thing was doing much for us at this stage….

But, after some more analysing maps, we discover that St. Osyth is a pleasant looking village a few miles away Jaywick, not a huge distance from Colchester. This was sounding better….

Then we discover that there was an episode of Time Team filmed there, as well as two pubs, a priory and a fish & chips shop. I’m now bloody delighted at this new game of ours. Nathan got excited that the pub had a burger meal for under £5 and I was already starting to watch the Time Team episode.

So, this little adventure is underway and we have train tickets now to get near there. I’ll leave the excitement of that journey for another post, especially as we’re not going until October, but the train tickets were a bargain £16 return with Greater Anglia. We might not be so fortunate when we select our next location, which will be at the moment that we physically reach our first location.

Quite where this adventure leads us who knows, but I’m sure it’ll be one of our better ideas. Which, frankly, wouldn’t be difficult.

There’s some background to this……

This is our first location. I’ll be bloody impressed if anyone I know is aware of this location that was randomly provided to us by GeoGuessr……

Sometimes it’s not sensible to let two idiots (well, part idiots) go to the pub unsupervised by adults, as bad things can happen. Fortunately, Nathan and I set off on a pub crawl making sure we limited ourselves to no more than three pints. It’s important to set a self-imposed limit so ensure that things don’t go wrong, although we decided that since we imposed the limit we could also break it.

Anyway, that’s a distraction to this little story. Although I get distracted easily, which is usually evident in my long-winded and often winding dialogue of events. So, at the moment there’s this really awesome guy who has decided to walk across Wales in a straight line. What he has done is fun, and pointless really, but is also quite inspirational.

The guy who has posted these videos, who incidentally has a great sense of humour, also posts a lot of videos about GeoGuessr. These videos are surprisingly entertaining, and to cut a long story short (see, I can do that!) the web-site gives viewers a random Google Streetview image and they have to guess where it is.

I’ve found this a highly entertaining web-site, but I thought also that it was likely to be a little bit niche. However, when discussing this walking across Wales in a straight line video, it transpired that Nathan was also a fan of GeoGuessr. How wonderful to have such an equally distracted (that’s the most polite word I can find in my mind at the moment) friend….

Right, back to why this is relevant. I like adventures, and I’d been toying with the idea of just going to wherever GeoGuessr came up with. And so, the rest of this story is probably starting to fit together, but for those who are confused (I can name them, but they’re mostly Nathan’s friends and I can say that because they’re not likely to read this) we thought that’s what we should do.

Our rules, I think, were that we’d go to anywhere in England and Wales. It was surprisingly exciting, as when the image loads we firstly have to find clues to work out where we’ve got to get to. And, unless it’s impossible, we need to get there by public transport. And yes, this is all a bit pointless, but there’s some excitement in having no idea where we’re going.

Or is it pointless? There’s a theme behind this, which is that I believe there’s fascinating history and culture nearly everywhere (I said nearly) and that there are very many places that I don’t know about that I would want to visit. However, how can I visit them when I don’t know about them? This is where random comes in.

Until we get bored of this, we’re going to try this theory, by going to whatever random place GeoGuessr comes up with. We’ve set our first location, but more of that in the next post…..