For the UK Explorer medal, you are required to take all 12 regions within the UK and while considerable efforts a few weeks ago brought us, that’s myself and ChoccyMuffin, up to 11 regions, we still required one more to complete the set and become official UK Explorers. However, that last region is not to be found in mainland UK, no, it’s across the Irish Sea in Northern Ireland. And that means a special trip by aeroplane, an AC-130. Oops, no that’s not correct, should be an Airbus A320, the other one is the Lockheed AC-130 Spectre, a heavily armed, long-endurance ground-attack variant of the C-130 Hercules transport aircraft.
So, we booked some budget accommodation in Belfast, at our usual hotel chain, Premier Inn, booked return tickets with EasyJet and set off from Edinburgh on our 4-day long adventure to the Emerald Isle. Oh, how I hate the sheer tedium of flying, the arriving early for security checks, the waiting for the gate number to be announced and the waiting on a windy and noisy runway to board the plane. In fact, we waited four times as long as the actual flight took complete the short hop to Belfast. And guess what, we gained our UK Explorer medal at the very first zone we took, zone BelfastAir, right outside the terminal building. Could have just hopped back onto a plane and returned home, job done, but thought we’d better make more of the trip.
For information, the 12 regions in the UK are: East Midlands, East of England, Greater London, North East England, North West England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, South East England, South West England, Wales, West Midlands and Yorkshire & The Humber. By the way the photo above was taken beside zone TheTwoBridges in Balfast and shows The Big Fish, also known as the Salmon of Knowledge or Pat the Fish, an artwork created to celebrate the return of fish to the River Lagan.
So, Belfast. Did the usual touristy stuff, the guided hop-on-hop-0ff bus tour, visited the very moving Titanic Experience and also did the Giant’s Causeway and Dark Hedges day bus tour. The Dark Hedges being the location for a scene in Game of Thrones. The Giant’s Causeway we let down by the sheer number of tourists there. Most disappointing and spoilt. We earned lot about The Troubles, 30-years of sectarian and political voilence in Northern Ireland fought over the region’s constitutional status. Must have been terrible to live here during that time. We also ate out each day, enjoying some good meals and scoffing various scones whenever possible. I even bought a book, the National Trust Book of Scones, which contains 50 recipes. I intend to make some of them and post how I get on here on Planet Gary. Watch out for a new section called Game of Scones.
Now, a different turf topic. Let us take a look at how we might take 10 zones in the fastest time possible. One way to help achieve that is to hold the Region Lord crown or time bonus. This deducts 5 seconds from each take time which will reduce your overall take time for 10 zones (actually 9 zones as the counter start after you take the first zone) by 45 seconds and that is not to be sneezed at!
So, how do you gain a Region Lord crown? Well, you need to be the turfer who holds the highest number of zones in a region. Seems easy enough but the biggest issue is that other turfers keep stealing your zones from you. However, during a recent trip to Northern Ireland for our UK Explorer medal, I noticed that turfers here were few and far between with only 4 turfer active in the region and 38% of those were tourists or visiting turfers. So, Northern Ireland might be a good place to take a few zones, hold them and wear that cherished Region Lord crown.
There is, however, a slight downside to this, in that you need to travel to Northen Ireland, either by ferry or plane and that all takes time and money. Fine if you are on holiday but expensive and time consuming otherwise. So, I started to look for easier alternatives and one region look promising, the East Midlands. Looking at the stats for round #192, and a few previous rounds, revealed that as with Northen Ireland, turfing activity is minimal with only 4 or 5 turfers taking small numbers of zones during the round with 68% of the takes by tourists. This lack of activity was further backed up in that all zones are still at 1pph. Anyway, food for thought and plans are afoot.
With the start of a new round only a few days ago, I was keen to tackle one of the few remaining medals on my to-do list. Being only 4 weeks in this round, I left the Roindpointer-750k medal for a 5-week round and decided to attempt the Diversiest medal. This one required taking 1000 round unique zones, that’s 1000 different zones within a single round. I’m off to a good start with Bonnyrigg, Rosewell, Eskbank and Dalkeith providing 105 zones on Sunday and 100 zones from Musselburgh and Wallyford today, giving me a nice 205 zones, about 1/5th of the way towards the 1000 required zones.
Wasn’t quite sure what strategy to employ for the Diversiest medal, but decided that simply block-clearing an area would do the trick. It also makes it easy to know what zones or areas I’ve taken and which are still available. To keep track of the overall total of round uniques you can find it displayed in the turf app, selecting the lightning symbol. Note that there are two figures shown below the Round section, one for takes and another or uniques. Make sure you go by the correct one.
Finally, sad to see that one of the most useful tools for looking at stats in this fine game is no longer being updated. I refer to https://frut.zundin.se otherwise known as FRUT. Not only have we lost a fine source of turf stats but it was also home to the many turf missions, some of which have tested us to the limit, i.e. Edinburgh Roon. I’m most disappointed that I probably won’t be able to complete the final section of Canal Quest 754 Westbound or Canal Quest 754 Eastbound. I would be happy to try and take it over, hosting it beside Planet Garybut suspect I just don’t have that level of coding skill. Oh well, fingers crossed that it may return one day. Back soon.
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