Turf insider November 2021

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Round winners[redigera]

Congratulations to the winners of round 136: féarglas from Scotland biked thru the nights to get her first Gold medal while skäggfar from Västmanland averaged 170 zones per day to secure his first Silver and vindturf from Södermanland turfed home his first Bronze!

Well done mates!

féarglas has the word:

" I, féarglas, want to thank people for the lovely messages, good wishes and kind words I received on winning the Gold medal this round. I am completely bowled over. Turf is many positive things to me, but the people make it especially wonderful. At round end, a new zone appeared in Edinburgh City called FaoiDheireadh (Irish language) and I know I will smile every time I visit it. Go raibh maith agaibh."

Bonanza 2022[redigera]

I hope you have made a date with the world's turfers in Västervik next year. This is where next year´s Bonanza will be held. Kalmar Turf association is the organizer together with local Västervik turfers. Welcome to Västervik on May 21st! See you there :) More information will follow closer to the event.

Scottish event 20/21 November[redigera]

If you find yourself in Aviemore, Scotland on the the weekend of 20/21 November, there is a plan to have a competitive event on the Saturday followed by an early group dinner, with perhaps a foot event at Glenmore on the Sunday. Come along for a great weekend, email Cambla on turfNEscot@gmail.com for more details.

If you don't want to travel to Scotland, you might want to head north, to Umeå in Sweden, this March for a Winter Classic with a serious twist.

24 h WINTER Event in Umeå 5-6th of March 2022[redigera]

Turf Västerbotten is inviting everyone to a very special event during the first weekend of March in 2022. Here is their invitation:

”Does it make sense to turf 24 hours in a row on your own or in a team with 3 participants where you take turns in two-hour sessions?

In 2017, Umeå was first in Turf history with a 24-hour team cycling event

In 2018, Kalmar Turfförening was the first in Turf history with an individual class in addition to teams. Both of these events took place during the summer with dry asphalt, green grass and warm weather.

Now we turn up the heat for this event a bit and will run it during winter, in March so put winter tires on your bike, buy some warm long john's, extra strong bicycle lights and head north. For Umeå is taking back the baton and will run this 24 hour event in full, so sign up for either the bicycle class or walking/running class.

Turf Västerbotten welcomes all interested turfers to this event and gives you the opportunity to win the unusual and coveted 24h-event medal. Only 74 turfers are proud owners of this medal.”

More information and instructions how to sign up for this event can be found on Turf Västerbotten's home page. So far all information is in Swedish, but here's hoping it will soon be available in English. And if not, there's always Google translate :D

In October the first ever Turf event took place in Germany, it was a private event organized by a local turfer named Morten and here is a report about it from another German turfer. I am sure more German events will follow.

First private Turf event in Hamburg by JoasK[redigera]

”Small but nice, private and not yet public. But at least, a first beginning has been made. This Sunday (ed. 17th of October), a few German Turf enthusiasts were driven to Hamburg, where everything started at the end of last year. Germany is still an absolute Turf diaspora. In Hamburg, Lübeck, Berlin, Cologne and Bonn there are a handful of people who regularly go turfing, but so far not much is happening.

That's why it was even nicer that on Sunday 9 Turf maniacs actually met in Hamburg for the first Turf event in Germany. The whole thing was organized by Morten, who is only 14 years old. For months he has been on fire for this wonderful game and currently he even leads the German ranking list.

Nobody really knew how such a Turf event worked. But after the countdown had expired, it was quite quickly clear what was going on. For one hour the 9 turfers chased through the event zones of Hamburg. The time flew by. Of course the Turfers from Hamburg had a little home advantage and so it was not surprising that the first six places were won by them. Afterwards the 9 turfers took a few zones together, so that they all won the Crowdy-8-Medal: Yeah! The afternoon ended with coffee and cake. A public event next year in Hamburg, was of course also considered.”

Let's hope the German turfers will multiply and a public event can be held in Hamburg, or some other nice German city, during 2022. There has been Turf events happening in Scotland too this last round and here's a little story about one of those:

SeaTurtle’s event at Balerno[redigera]

"It was great fun organising the latest turf event in Balerno, which is west of the city at the foot of the Pentland Hills, and good that lots of people turned up. People especially loved all the ‘rooty’ zones in the North of the village!!! Congratulations to ESOCWalter who scored most points on the day, while cycling with Dusty in a doggy backpack and taking the reservoir water zone more than once. ESOCKisaKat was top junior!"

Tandem’s Foot Diversiest[redigera]

"Could I visit 30 unique zones a day, every day, for 5 weeks to achieve the Diversiest medal? That was my target and from day 1 I was ahead of schedule and achieved the medal half way through week 5. I walked an average of 30km a day and in the last hour of the round hit 400,000 points, double what I would normally reach in a round. It was good to visit new areas, like the Borders and Mid Lothian as my home county of East Lothian has just over 500 zones but my biggest surprise was the Edinburgh zones. Being a country lass I usually avoid the city but I was very pleasantly surprised by the number of green areas, parks and ponds and a fabulous network of cycle/walkways which allow you to get around but avoid the traffic.

I had a lot of encouragement from turfers I knew but also met new ones along the way. It was hard at times but the sense of achievement made it all worthwhile. A more restful 5 a day this round, I should manage that :)"

CSL on zone making[redigera]

"Now that we can travel more widely, I've enjoyed turfing in new areas - the turf zones usually take you to unusual places. I was pleased to have the chance to visit Rochdale, in Lancashire, recently. This is one of the towns where I did my apprenticeship as a zonemaker, and it was interesting to see some of "my" zones at last! Creating zones is a slow business, and the zonemakers all do it in their spare time. I've noticed some comments on the UK chat recently from people who say they've made lots of suggestions but not seen any new zones in their area. There are only about 20 of us for the whole world, so please be patient! Coverage in the UK is patchy, and we try to make new zones in the places with most activity, but of course this is hard to judge."

I can only agree with CSL how fun and interesting it is to visit places where you have made the zones. I spent three weeks in Germany in September/October doing just this. It was great fun to travel by car and bike thru Germany, meeting local turfers and taking over 1100 unique zones. It also became very obvious that most Germany cities are severely under-zoned. Nowhere were we close to a Ferret or a Weasel (10 zones in 10 respectively 15 min), we didn't even make a Beaver (10 zones in 20 min) in Hamburg or Berlin where the zone density is better than in most other Germany cities. Perhaps part of the problem was we were turfing during day time with heavy traffic all around, but it also became obvious how far it is between the zones once you leave the city centre, and some of these cities are spread over a very large area. On the way home thru Sweden we stopped in Vaggeryd for unique zones and had no problem at all to take a Weasel on lovely bike paths and with almost no traffic in sight on a Sunday afternoon.

Did you know...[redigera]

...that Scotland has 1,8 zones per inhabitant, but only 0,1 zones per km2? The same numbers for Stockholm is 2,4 zones per inhabitant and 0,9 zones per km2. And for London it is 0,3 zones per inhabitant and 1,8 zones per km2. Turf Crew considers every inhabitant a potential turfer and hope one day it will be so :)

Turfa lugnt/Safe turfing!

//Munin

...if you want to contribute to future Turf Insiders, send your story to insider@turfgame.com :) It can be small, big, funny, sad, but as long as it is Turf-related, it has a good chance of being featured in next Turf Insider!