Over the weekend I visited friends in Cologne and decided to bike back. I took a leisurely tour through the Zonser Grind, a nature reserve in the form of a fat peninsula into the Rhine. It looks like this from the air:
It's even nicer up close: the landscape is made up of a broad pebble beach on the wide, slow-moving Rhine, then come grass-covered dunes and rows of poplars and stump willows (Kopfweiden) in which owls, crows, and orioles flit about. It's pretty hard to reach, not only because it's a peninsula but also because the base of the peninsula is taken up mostly by factories, both working and apparently abandoned. You have to endure a lot of industrial grimness before you enter nature. The result is that, even during fine weather like yesterday's, you'll easily be able to find a meadow all to yourself.
Looking for more information about it, I quickly came across the official government portal for nature reserves in Northern Rhine-Westphalia,which lists the legal details (g) concerning the status of the reserve. From this page, we learn that the "digitalized area" of the reserve is 392.4 hectares, while the "official area" is 328.59. We also learn that the designation as a nature reserve will expire in the year 9999.
So visit the Zonser Grind while you can, since you've only got 2,882,405 days before someone obliterates it with an orgasmatron factory.
For "9999" one should not think like a lawyer but like a programmer. They probably use a Excel version from 1890 and found no variable for "indefinite/unlimited". 9999 means 'unbefristed'.
BTW, why is that peninsula fat? It bends but it doesn`t bulge.
Posted by: xxx | September 11, 2012 at 05:14 PM