Around the golf course, across the solar system

The weather was not half as bad as the forecast had led me to believe, so there was no reason at all to stay indoors. This morning I made good on an outstanding promise to myself, namely to explore the bridleway leading through the Fulford golf course where I inadvertantly landed during a run two weeks ago. I tried this route unsuccessfully once thereafter on bike, in the utter darkness, in an attempt to reach the York Maze on bonfire night.

Fear of snitches may be justified

The light of day brought clarity. The golf course actually extends quite a way across the highway, and when I gave up and turned around on my bike I had actually been standing smack on the middle of a green. Hopefully no golf club member will ever read this blog! The actual bridleway (to me indistinguishable from a footpath but I am sure that there are fine nuances that escape my dull Dutch understanding) goes around, obviously. It's a nicely varied path, with some coppices and a lot of fields, all looking rather unkempt at this time of year, and the immaculate tees on the other side. At first I though there were no other Secret Society members out, but though the dog owners were indeed conspicuously absent I did meet a larger group of runners midway. It is a pity that all along the way you hear the continuous noise of the highway. It makes you wonder: will it ever again be silent? Ever? At some point we will surely run out of fossil fuels, but by then alternative energy sources may have taken over and continue to feed our hunger for transportation. On the other hand, if you think on a scale of millions rather than hundreds of years, it is hard to imagine that humanity can have created something that will last that long.

Rural parts

Apart from the highway this is a very quiet, rural part of the country. The map shows an airstrip a little bit further south, and given that there are still no roads going there even at daytime, not even public footpaths or bridleways, I cannot but think that it is a military airfield - abandoned or not I cannot say. On Friday in one of the pubs there was one piloty type and two stewardessy types who invited us to free Guinnesses and tickets in a lottery that, when won, would earn us a place on a private jet to the Guinness brewery in Dublin and back that same night. It was close to 20:00 when we were told this and the jet was supposed to take off at 20:40. Nobody knew any airports close enough to make this possible, so maybe that's a confirmation... although, would the English military be party to such an arrangement? (As I'm writing this I am checking whether the offer could have been for real, and yes there is such a lottery! The article mentions Luton though. Pity I really despise Guinness...)

Bike trail 65: Straight as an arrow from Sun to Pluto

After my longest run yet I spent time quite pleasantly on a programming task I have set myself, but in the afternoon I grew a bit restless and wondered if I should not rather take this opportunity to tick off one of the other destinations I had been told about: a bike route to Selby, which has been turned into a scale model of the Solar System as part of the millennium celebrations. I know of one such scale model in the Netherlands, at Westerbork (a place that is acutally much better known, infamously, for being one of the stops on the way for the Jew deportations during WW2). The one along the Selby bike trail (no. 65) stretches about 10 km from Sun to Pluto.

Pluto and Cheiron

The special thing about this trail, which makes it very suitable for such a model, is that it, too, is a converted railroad track, like the one from Scarborough to Whitby. Unfortunately the terrain is much less interesting, since south of York the land is really flat (and I do mean Dutch-grade flat); but in consequence the trail is straight as an arrow, and so the distances between the planets have been projected onto a straight line. After 400m you are done with the first four (as everyone knows, Mother Very Thoughtfully Made A Jam Sandwich Under No Protest, and so the first four are Mercury, Venus, Terra (= Earth) and Mars). The Asteroids were absent; the gas giants, kilometers apart, accounted for the rest of the available space. Pluto is nowadays degraded from an undersized planet to an oversized comet but it was still there in this display, though I missed it at first since they placed it on a small artificial hill - Very Thoughtfully in my opinion, since its orbit indeed brings it outside the plane of the solar system. It is even granted a moon, which I think is grossly unfair since Jupiter, which has 67 of them by the last count, some larger than Pluto itself, is denied even a single one in this model.

The millennium is now visibly more than a decade ago: it's high time they clear the moss off the Sun and the graffitti off the planets. Otherwise this will not be one of those human constructions that last for the next few million years! Which of course makes me very glad that I went to see it while it is still there.